The best teacher

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Hello, guys!

Over here, it is a beautiful and promising Sunday morning. I lost my grip on sleep so early this morning and instead I was up reflecting over this topic I'm sharing with you. Kindly let me know what you think about it.

It is commonly said that experience is the best teacher. Well, that is very true but have you ever taken the time to ask why it so?

That is because the lesson experience teaches most of the time tend to come with a mixture of pain and regret, and as we all know, pain reinforces remembrance. As a result, we tend to commit to memory the lessons learnt through experience.

For example, a child, after watching an adult get burnt by fire, might not really take the cue that it burns. He would most likely play with the same fire if he gets the chance to do so. It is well after he has received his own share of the burns that he would learn not to play with fire a next time. Alas, he would have learnt his lesson, but only too late and in an unnecessarily hard way that could have been totally avoided in the first place.

But we don't really have to learn the hard way. We don't necessarily have to make mistakes before getting things done. Sometimes, these mistakes might be too costly and even if they are amendable, we tend to lose valuable time and energy that could be spent in other productive ventures trying to redeem ourselves from them.

For instance, my little brother and I were having a conversation some days back, and he told me about a classmate of his whose relative had been in prison for the past 30 years. This relative got released sometimes last month or thereabout, and according to my brother's classmate, the ex convict was very surprised when he got home and saw everyday common gadgets like Laptops, Smartphones, and plasma TV because he had been locked away from the outside world for a very long time. Thirty years is just an awfully long time for one to spend in incarceration, and I felt very sad hearing his story. But that was the price he had to pay for whatever crime he committed three decades ago. It was an experience he needed to undergo so as to learn that whatever he did thirty years ago was wrong. Now, I'm very certain he would think twice before committing such crime or even any kind of crime again. Thus, the said ex convict now knows better that it is not good to commit a felony but only after he has learnt it in a rather painful and time-consuming way.

We have a myriad of print and non-print sources to learn from. By print sources, I'm talking about books, movies and other media we can learn valuable life lessons from. And by non-print, I'm referring to the testimonies and experiences of other people that we can learn from. However, it is a pity that so many people in the world today downplay the importance of the lessons embedded in stories, movies and so on. The more disturbing thing is that a lot still carry out illegal activities believing that they won't get caught but when they are finally caught, they will start pleading for second chances.

We don't really need second chances if we really take cues from events. It is like the famous adage that says, "those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it."

When you transverse that same statement, it tells that those who learn from history will not repeat it, and that is just the fact. We must learn to take cues from the world around us because they are pointers to either the wrong direction or the right. A careful attention to these will save us from unnecessary pains and regrets. We really don't have to learn the hard way!