Let’s not be afraid of being wrong!
“Trying to be right” takes many forms and some of them are extremely subtle. One such is the fear of being wrong, either in one’s own eyes or the eyes of others.
Knowing when we are right is not within our power. How, in fact, can I know anything at all?1
FM Alexander’s response to this question was, according to the Teaching Aphorisms:
“To know when we are wrong is all that we shall ever know in this world.”2
Being wrong can become our ally. Until we know in what way we are wrong we can’t change it:
“Like a good fellow, stop the things that are wrong first!”2
We need to learn to make friends with not so much “being wrong” in itself, but the recognition of it. Hence FM’s plea:
“Don’t come to me unless, when I tell you you are wrong, you make up your mind to smile and be pleased.”2
Maybe some things, like the leopard and his spots, can’t be changed; acceptance is needed. Acceptance, though, can be both a powerful spiritual process or a way of justifying either certain traits that one is not ready to take a long hard look at or, in other cases, a general laissez-fair attitude (which FM also cautions us against3).
Reinhold Niebuhr expressed it well:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.”4
1. BBC Radio 4’s “A History of Ideas” recently broadcast a series of talks with this title, particularly referencing Bishop Berkley, Karl Popper, David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (See: BBC Radio 4 iPlayer [UK only].)
2. Teaching Aphorisms: The Alexander Journal No 7, 1972, published by the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique. Also published in Articles and Lectures by Mouritz (1995).
3. “…active, vigilant, and open-eyed to the evils which result from his old policy of laissez-faire.” Man’s Supreme Inheritance, FM Alexander, Chapter VII Notes and Instances (response to question III). Published by Mouritz, London 1986.
4.The Serenity Prayer is the common name for a prayer authored by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer).
© 2015 John S Hunter
Upward Thought 
Well, all else being equal, specific ‘wrongs’ would stand out against a general atmosphere of ‘rightness.’ But FM realized that nobody’s sense of the Right can really be trusted. The better our coordination, the fewer idiosyncrasies we have to feel. And then the more obvious and transient the feeling of wrongness becomes.
Niebuhr DID copyright a version of the prayer in around 1944. But AA had already been using it for about three years. A clipping had fallen out of someone’s letter to AA’s central office in New York with the prayer on it. Many years later, an archivist was able to identify the source: an obituary in the New York Herald. So the ‘origin’ stories keep coming up vague.