In world war I Henry Tanedy, an English recipient of Victoria cross, found a wounded German soldier in his gunsight, but instead of killing him he took pity on him and decided to not to kill him. That soldier went on to remove half of his mustache and put half of the world into chaos, he went on to become Führer of Nazi Germany.
Mistakes sometimes can be devastating, mostly for oneself, but in some rare cases for whole of humanity. They shape our present and future equally. Mistakes are like carvings on the bark of a tree, with time the carving wont move up or down, wont increase in size. But the tree around it will keep growing. Mistake will stay part of what we are, no matter how much we grow. The marks of mistake might get darker, but they will stay with us.
What we can do though is to keep growing like a tree. Doing more things, becoming more things. When we’ll grow the marks of the mistakes wont grow with us, but the mark will become smaller part of us. A mark which might remind us of the mistake we did, but it will tell us that we have came a long way from it, that one mistake or those many mistakes make us what we are today.