Lessons vs. Experience---Whats your take?


Lessons vs Experiences

First and foremost, I gain as much from writing this blog, as you get from reading it, so thank you very much for those that have stuck around.  This year will mark 10 years in my journey of blogging and 26 years of writing, 1 book and 1000s of blog entries and here we are so if you have been with me since the beginning, thank you.  Many of my blog posts were taken from my journal and added to my blog over the last 5 or so years.  It was my way of removing secrecy and putting it all out there.  Transparency has been big throughout my whole life, its no wonder that I have been lied to often, but that doesn’t change my stance.  I have said before, you give 100% and only expect 1% back, your life will be blessed.

I decided to write on lessons vs experience because I see so many people posting about “not losing the lesson”, or “in everything there is a valuable lesson”.  As I have pondered this over the last few weeks, I humbly feel that we put too much emphasis on the lesson, when in reality, its all an experience.  If you choose to take the “lesson” with you, then that is your choice or possibly your way of validating that the experience happened for a “reason”.  

I offer you a different approach. Rather than trying to gather all these lessons from
  • Losing your home due to financial difficulty
  • The loss of a dear family member unexpectedly
  • The ending of a relationship
  • Loss of your job
  • and the list goes on

Maybe start chalking it up to an “Experience” with no intrinsic value of good or bad.  We say well the lesson was, in order to find the good and carry on.  Maybe just valuing the experience itself carries all the merit  we need.  Don't look for reasons or explanations as often times there are not.  

I am very guilty of this.  Every time a relationship ends, I start the questioning of why.  Why did this happen to me?  Whats the lesson?  And just today it came to me in the shower, “maybe its not about any lesson, but rather just an experience”  In this way you can begin to move forward without any lesson baggage.  I have found that lesson baggage leaves you guarded, defensive and oft times unlovable.  I get it, shit happens to all of us, but its important to recognize the experience and not necessarily the lesson.

We are here as humans to experience, in my humbled opinion, and that is it.  Its not like we are going to meet the afterlife with this awesome bag of lessons and its going to give us karmic superiority.  To me its just baggage we take with us.  I also know that people will say what a menial life to categorize your life by “experiences”  Like you box it up, categorize it and move on, but in truth, what else are you going to do with it.  To me the realization of an experience is the lesson of it all.  She broke up with me-wow that was an experience.  I got in a car wreck-wow that was an experience. I almost died in a plane crash-wow that was an experience.

The experience is the story, but it never defines you.  The experience doesn’t have to have a lesson, for it can exist on its own.  The experience is its own event and its a moment in time.  If you are like me you can choose to have a blank slate every day and therefore the lessons don't weigh you down.  For some of you this will be impossible because you need to know the reason, or gain the lesson to move on.  My idea to convert it to an experience is just that, an idea.

Again, I am just a philosopher and ideas come to me all the time.  I share them and see what the response is.  Above all love yourself, pride yourself above all other things and people.  If there is no you, there is no existence and no experience.  Treat yourself with the highest kindness that your life deserves because in the end, there is only you :-)


Until next time…

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