Why did our heart break, why'd we get burned
Just like the seasons,
There are reasons for the path we take
There are no mistakes, just lessons to be learned
- Lessons to Be Learned
As the countdown for the new year began, I thought to myself, “Well..a year has gone by and a new year is about to begin. What did I learn during this past year?” I realised that I never really thought about this. Indeed, every single day of our life is filled with learning experiences and yet how many of us are actually able to recognise them as such?
I’m quite sure that there are many of us who simply will not recognise or acknowledge lessons that can be learned from life. One simple example would be this; we know that we have an early day the next day and yet we still go for a late night out. And all we do the next day is complain about how tired we are. We know that we have to work and yet we go out and enjoy ourselves. And sometimes we do this over and over again without thinking. We should have learned our lesson by the second time. And yet, we don’t. We never learn. Why?
Another form of lesson that can be learnt is our mistakes. Modern society looks on mistakes as some malicious disease that must be avoided at all cost. But without mistakes we will never learn anything. So many inventions, medicines and so forth started as mistakes. The aeroplane was never successfully built on the first try. No vaccine will be 100% effective on its first try. It often takes countless mistakes and re tries before anything comes to fruition.
Just imagine this – if people like Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison gave up after making a few mistakes, we would have never had the telephone or the light bulb. Everything happens for a reason, every mistake that was made happens for a reason. The reason is that we can learn from them and become wiser and not make the same mistake again. If we do not learn and become better from our mistakes, then our whole life would have been a failure.
Of course, no one wants to make a mistake, especially if it involves big sums of money. In places like the Stock Exchange or a trading company, a simple mistake can cost a person huge amounts of money. But then, no one is perfect and mistakes are bound to happen every now and then. We live in an imperfect world filled with imperfect people. The one thing that can help us get up again after falling down is to acknowledge the mistake we made and to resolve not to repeat the same mistake. That very act of acknowledgement and resolve will make us into a wiser person. In doing this act, we would have learned something more valuable than anything we will learn in a classroom.
So even though we sometimes make what seems to be a bad choice or lousy decision, we ask ourselves why we were so dumb as to make that lousy choice. The truth is, we’re not dumb. Bad judgement maybe, but not dumb. Because mistakes are lessons in the making. And mistakes will help us to be more cautious the next time round and to see what should be done and what should not. If we are afraid of making mistakes, we will never advance through life and worst of all, we will never grow.
When we think of ourselves as dumb, if we repeat it often enough or have the statement repeated to us, sooner or later, we will become dumb. Tell a person that he is stupid often enough and he will become stupid and become incapable of learning anything. We should avoid calling ourselves stupid or dumb because it will have a detrimental effect on our lives and personality. And we should not call others stupid either. (Unfortunately, I’m guilty of this too) Very often, it is done unconsciously and we do not realise the negative effect that it will bring.
So remember; every time we make a mistake, think of it as a lesson to be learned. We will go through life making many mistakes, the trick is to be able to learn from these mistakes and use these lessons to improve our own lives and the lives of others around us.
