Life Lessons — Experience

Life happens.

Some of what happens in my life is the result of choices I make. Some comes from choices other people make. And sometimes events occur that neither I nor anyone around me chose, yet those events change the choices available to all of us.

All of these become part of my experience.

But I have learned something important along the way:

Having an experience and understanding an experience are not necessarily the same thing.

Marriage and family life taught me that.

Two people can live through the same event and remember it differently. Erma and I do not always agree about the facts of things that happened when we were together. At times, that has been difficult for our children because they naturally want to know, What really happened?

Neither one of us possesses a video recording of the past. We remember events from where we were standing, what we knew, what we felt, and how we understood what was happening at the time.

The same thing happens in friendships. Two people can leave the same conversation with very different understandings of what was said.

That doesn’t mean there are no facts.

It means we don’t always have the whole story.

I learned something similar while studying American history.

The American history course I took at UMSL was very different from the history I had learned in high school. We studied the period from the Civil War through World War I—the Industrial Age or Gilded Age.

Our professor was a feminist, and she helped us look at that period through questions I had not considered before. We studied women’s rights, the struggle between rich and poor, the end of Reconstruction following the election of 1876, vertical and horizontal integration, mass marketing, and the rise of big business.

The history hadn’t changed.

My view of the history had changed because I was seeing parts of the story I had not seen before.

Another professor might have emphasized something else.

That taught me something about experience.

A different perspective doesn’t necessarily change the facts. Sometimes it allows me to see facts I hadn’t noticed before.

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:12:

“For now we see through a glass, darkly.”

I have always loved that old King James language.

I can see.

But I cannot see everything.

Experience can help clear the glass. It can give me greater understanding. It can challenge assumptions I have carried for years.

But experience can also do something very different.

It can harden me.

I can have one bad experience and turn it into a rule about everyone.

Someone hurts me, and I decide people can’t be trusted.

I have a bad experience with someone from a particular group, and I decide, Those people are all like that.

I encounter something new that frightens me, and I decide it must be bad.

This is where generalizations can become stereotypes, and stereotypes can become bias and prejudice.

The experience may have been real.

The generalization I created from it may not be.

That is why Sacred Writings continually challenge me to guard my heart.

It is also why our different ways of seeking truth cannot be separated from one another.

Tradition influences how I interpret my experiences. Experience can cause me to question a tradition. Sacred Writings can challenge the conclusions I draw from both. Reason helps me examine what I think I know.

And through all of them, I need discernment.

Even something as simple as what we call Scripture can illustrate this.

Someone may have grown up calling these writings the Holy Bible and reading the King James Version. Those traditions may be deeply meaningful. They may connect that person with parents, grandparents, churches, and some of the most important experiences of their life.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But there is a difference between saying:

“The King James Version is deeply meaningful to me.”

and saying:

“The King James Version is the only Bible Christians should use.”

There is a difference between saying:

“I call this book the Holy Bible.”

and deciding that someone who uses the term Sacred Writings must not really be Christian.

I have taken my experience and tradition and turned them into a universal axiom everyone else must follow.

And I need to be careful not to make the same mistake in the opposite direction by judging people who prefer the traditional language.

My experience is real.

But my experience is not everyone’s experience.

I see this today in the way people respond to artificial intelligence.

Some people are frightened by AI. I am not particularly frightened by it. I see it as a useful tool that can be used for good purposes and can also be misused.

Perhaps part of my reaction comes from experience.

I remember concerns about computers. I remember reactions to cell phones. Before that, people worried about television and movies. New technology often produces both excitement and fear.

My experience helps me recognize that pattern.

But even there, I have to be careful.

I cannot simply conclude that because some fears about earlier technologies proved exaggerated, every concern about AI must also be exaggerated.

AI raises its own questions.

Experience gives me something to consider. It does not automatically give me the answer.

Experience should make me curious, not merely certain.

That is why I call this category Life Lessons.

These aren’t simply stories about things that have happened to me.

The lesson often doesn’t arrive when the experience does.

Sometimes years pass before I can look back and understand something differently. What once looked like failure may eventually teach me something I couldn’t see at the time. Something I once blamed entirely on another person may eventually cause me to recognize choices of my own. Something for which I blamed myself may later reveal circumstances I never controlled.

And sometimes another person tells me a part of the story I had never heard.

Then the glass becomes a little clearer.

I cannot always choose what happens to me.

I cannot choose what other people do.

I cannot control every event that changes the road before me.

But I can choose what I do with what I experience.

Will it make me bitter or wiser?

Will it reinforce my prejudices or challenge them?

Will I dig in and insist that I already know the whole story?

Or will I remain teachable?

Perhaps that is one of the greatest life lessons I have learned:

Experience can be a wonderful teacher, but only if I remain willing to learn.

I am still looking through the glass.

I am still asking questions.

I am still discovering parts of the story I didn’t know.

And I am still learning.

The Curious Pilgrim