You Can’t Learn From The Mistakes Of Others
Learning is a fascinating process. Fascinating doesn’t mean it’s always fun or easy to learn. It doesn’t mean we’re always ready to go as deep as the moment deserves.
We begin this learning process by observing the world with our eyes wide open, looking at it in awe as things happen around us. While our family members tell us how cute we are, we are focused on other things.
We see how an object appears and disappears and assume that it is the same object. We assume that things continue to exist, even if they escape our view. We realize that everyone else is talking to each other in a common language and not in the gibberish we use.
And so we make it our goal to learn this way of communication, because we also want to experience what it’s like to share, to ask for things, to express our opinion.
We soon involve experiments in all this observation. We throw a spoonful of baby food or a drinking cup on the floor and learn about the amazing gravity. This is, without a doubt, much more interesting than our angry parents or the way our grandparents ignore it.
As we grow, our parents should grow too. Neither of these two developments is easy, because parents want to protect their children. But at the same time, children want more and more freedom.
And so, one day, parents realize that their children have left the nest and that there are many things that they will have to confront all on their own. However, it is even more difficult for parents to understand that they are still in control of some things. That there are some things that they already know and that their children will have to learn for themselves.
The taste of learning
I’m sure a teenager could read all the books out there about love, but they will never really learn love until they start experiencing it. Of course love can be wonderfully described, but we will only recognize these descriptions as such if we have known love ourselves. Before you have experienced the love, it sounds like something strange and from another world.
Likewise, there are some other lessons that you can only learn if you experience them yourself. Why is this so? Because these lessons have to do with ourselves. We are directly involved. They are complicated emotional processes that we must develop in order to reach adulthood and find our way.
In other words, no matter how similar our genome is, each of us has some degree of acceptance and tolerance. We must learn to hobble around this world with our own qualities and not someone else’s.
We must create our own definition of love, hate and mistrust. Regardless of the fact that everyone’s definition ultimately comes down to almost the same thing. It’s the details that make the difference. They make us us and not the people who want to give us advice with the best of intentions.
Some pain cannot be avoided. The first big disappointment in a friendship, for example. Others may tell us that a certain person is bad, that he is not good for us, but we want proof. We have to throw the spoon on the floor. It is not enough that others tell us that he will fall.
