Experience: A Wonderful Teacher--A paragraph a Day

I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives.
But all of life's experiences, bad and good, make you who you are.
Erasing any of life's experiences would be a great mistake.   -Luis Miguel


It's fascinating how life works.  I had thought that things had settled down a bit, that I was going to be able to go for a certain amount of time without anything drastic happening, but then some members of my family decided to dash that thought to tiny little pieces.  And over the summer, a very negative and difficult time played out in my life.  But I made it through, and I did my best to keep reminding myself that no matter how difficult things got, other people have much more difficult problems to deal with, and I was being exposed to an opportunity to learn through trial, and it was a trial that definitely wasn't going to kill me or destroy any part of my life.  So I made it through and I learned a lot, all because I was pushed into a situation in which I ended up learning a lot about my family and myself, and which brought back a whole lot of childhood issues, many of which I'm afraid were never fully processed--so I have the chance now to process some of the things that could have been processed decades ago, had I had any support at the time that would have allowed me to do so.  I like Luis' words here--our experiences make us who we are.  We learn from them, or we don't.  I would add that our responses to those experience play a great role in how much or just what we learn, but this passage is just as good without my addition.  What are you going through right now?  What did you go through in July, or in the spring, or in the winter?  What did it teach you?  Did you learn those lessons and take them to heart?  It's important that you do so because life gives us ways to learn all the time, but it's up to us to learn from them or not, to see their value or to let them harm us.  I prefer to learn from my experiences, as the more I learn, the more I grow more fully into the person I'm meant to be.