Are difficult experiences valuable lessons for the future
Life experiences definitely come in many different forms and shapes. They can be really sweet and really painful just as well. There is an opinion that sooner or later all of the above mentioned experiences would turn into valuable lessons of some kind.
I think it is a little naive and somewhat childish approach. This is the way people want it to be, not the way it actually happens in real life. I am convinced that, unless some supernatural powers interfere, no experiences will start turning into anything of value. It seems to me that some efforts must be applied, because experience is not the sort of things that can come naturally, so to speak. To give an obvious example, if a student flunks his or her examinations one day, and gets into big trouble with the faculty and the dean put together, how likely is this student to do well on the exams next term? It remains to be seen, unless the student in question had given the whole thing some thought and decided to do everything possible not to get in such a jam over again. I suppose that if he hadn’t done that, he would simply repeat the whole mess once more.
Quite naturally, things don’t work out this way all the time. There are people who do learn from their mistakes. The bad part about this very peculiar kind of learning is that it always hurts, one way or another. If one has the habit of learning only after some first-hand experience, he will most certainly suffer from it. I personally can tell from my own experience that it’s way more reasonable to stay on the safe side and avoid unpleasant experiences. Because when you have to deal with some of them you rarely think about all of the good things that can come with it some time in the remote future. What you really think about in such moments is how uncomfortable, upsetting and painful the whole experience is and how much it hurts to go through it.
Still I have to admit that it can do you some good later on. But it’s necessary to work on the difficult experiences that happen to you once in a while, if you really want them to turn into valuable lessons in the future. Gain is how we learn, said C.S. Lewis. That’s the way things go. But not always, unfortunately. Sometimes people happen to die if the pain is too big. And therefore they don’t learn anything anymore.
