There is no teacher like experience, no learning like that through failure.
Some knowledge can be obtained through stories, in an effort to be prepared for real-world experience. We tell stories, and we listen to other people tell stories. We take courses. We study.
However, until you have lived something for yourself, you have only theory. It is a form of knowledge; but it is not knowing.
Living through something creates a kind of imprint on the synapses of your mind that is just not possible through theoretical learning. Perhaps this is because the lesson is recorded together with emotion. A deeper form of memory. The circuitry of the brain adapts and refines its survival impulse for future reference.
Even animals make mistakes. Should they survive, they learn and adapt. They are (usually) permanently rewired to avoid making those errors again. We each recall our lessons learned through hardship, and how these are so much more powerful than any through success.
So it seems this thing called ‘life’ is completely about experiential learning.
You know it is most likely that you will in time lose a loved one — conceptually you imagine it. You sympathize as best as you can when others go through this experience. Then it happens to you. Now you know. You really know. Now you can empathize.
You might have uttered the words “…in sickness and in health.” But you don’t understand or know what that means until you have truly lived through each of these extremes and all that lies in-between.
You know that good nutrition and exercise reduce the risk of various diseases and health issues. Perhaps that doctor has told you what you need to do. Yet you don’t understand it ‘for real’ until that sudden admittance to hospital or near-death experience. Then you wake up and the reality sets in. Everything in your personal version of the world has changed.
There are so many more examples. We each have our stories.
Don’t desire for everything to ‘work out’, or for your life to be ‘normal’. Don’t hope to get everything ‘right’. Don’t hope for ignorance as a means to bliss.
Seek for your version of living to be in part anomalous, to be unusual, for it to contain complexity. Surely that will be a life well-lived; full of deep learning and no doubt the forging of your very being.
Even as I write these words I’m acutely aware they contain knowledge merely as concepts. Wisdom comes when such words are finally understood; not conceptually, but through a moment of enlightenment — of pure knowing.
Life can’t be taught. There is no short-cut to learning that which there is to know about living.
Each and every one of us just has to experience it for ourselves.
