“You don’t have to be a chicken to make an omelette.” One of my more favorite quotes and very, very true. There are many ways to learn and personal experience is only one of them. But in a world that has moved from agrarian conservatism where tradition is survival because trying something new can get you killed and all those who depend on you to innovation is king and we need to have new experiences each day or life is not worth living, our own personal experience has taken on a heightened significance. What went before is nice and pundits, historians, and academics can sift through it for meaning if they want. What I know in myself is what counts, right?
But what you experience is boundaried by your own actions, your limitations, your social and geographic resources and the experiences given to you buy your family of origin and personal history. Your own experience is by its very nature subjective and full of meaning and structure you have created through your own judgements and those of your family and peers. And the crux of the matter is, what if what you know turns out to be wrong?
What if everything you have experienced has happened because you formed a judgement of how the world works, thinking it was truly the world and you were just reacting to it, when in fact the world and all its components was actually reacting to your actions, which are based on your misunderstanding of the world? What if it’s not them, it really is you? What if people are trying to get through to you what the world isn’t out to get you, you are setting yourself up to fail over and over to meet your expectation that the world is out to victimize you? What if all those people who are telling you that you are wonderful are right? What if all the opportunities being brought to you are actually things you can do instead of a capricious universe teasing you with things that can never be? What if you really do have the right stuff? What if it can work out? What if you marry this person they don’t cheat or steal or lie and in the end you are happy for a lifetime?
Until you challenge the judgements you have formed about ‘how life is’ you’ll never know. Because your own experience which tells you that life is like ‘this’ and can’t ever change will cause you to seek out situations and make choices that confirm that over and over. However, the one constant in the universe is change so it’s impossible that the world is unchanging the way your mind tells you it is. So take a moment and challenge the assumptions, the judgements, the pillars that hold up your world. Are they actually true even through you’ve experienced them that way ‘forever’? Or are they just that way because that’s what you’ve come to expect? What happens if you change what you know? What happens if what you experience because something very different? Who will you be then?