Recently I was at the movie theater and afterwards went to the restroom. I walked into a bathroom stall and soon after I heard someone enter the stall next to me. She said, “Hi Laurie! It’s Patricia.” I was surprised someone had spotted me and replied aloud, “Oh, hello…which Patricia is this?” She replied, “Um-huh. Yeah, I can be there by 10:00.” I realized, sheepishly, that Patricia?whoever she was?was on the phone with someone else and wasn’t talking to me at all. Needless to say I scurried out of the restroom in case I was spotted as the woman talking to the wall.

My husband and I had a good laugh at this. But actually it was a little lesson in not making it mean anything more me than the fact that I’d made a silly, honest mistake and it was indeed a coincidental happenstance with our similar names. Even so, there are many things I’ve done where I’ve felt higher levels of my own foolish behavior. Yet that’s one of the many positives about aging, that these kinds of things begin to matter far less.

If you catch yourself doing something goofy, how do you regard it? Do you say, “that was dumb of me,” or do you cut yourself some slack?