Experience, they say, is the best
teacher.
You must have heard this said many
times. Yes, once bitten, twice shy!
The more I have thought about it, the
more I get convinced that experience can be a very lousy teacher. Yes,
experience can be the worst teacher. It has lied to many and it continues to
misinform us especially when it comes to who we really are and who we can
become.
We have been lied to in many ways and
some of the lies have become part of our way of thinking. When growing up as
little children, we were told stories centered on superstition to instill fear
or to educate us. Our parents were very wise and creative, and they knew how to
create stories that frightened us and stopped us from doing things that could
have been dangerous to us. In the little hamlet where I grew up in Africa,
parents had a knack for creating such stories. For instance, when they send a
child to fetch water from the brook or to deliver a message to a neighbor, they
would make the child spit on the dry dust on the ground and tell them that
their navel would disappear if the spit dried up upon their return from the
small mission. So the kid would run very fast to deliver the massage; the kid
wants to get home as quickly as possible and see the lingering wetness of their
own saliva on the dry dust. Parents achieved their desire to have the child come
home pretty fast, but somehow, and unwittingly, they tell lies to the child and
this lie remains buried in their unconsciousness for years.
They teach the child to fear.
They teach us to think their thoughts
and act on their own fears. They have been useless when they grew up and they
figured by that same token that you’ll be useless too. Daddy looks at you and
listens as you tell him that you’ll become a footballer. He shakes his head and
tells you roughly that you are good for nothing. You think he speaks the truth.
You may think he doesn’t really like you. It could be because he tried and
failed. Or because he never even tried at all.
The lies we have been told aren’t lies
that are centered on superstition because we do grow up and in our turn we begin
to rationalize things. Some of the little things they told us can be laughed
away, and at times when we remember them, we laugh even more at how ridiculous
we have been. However, there is a deeper, more damaging lie that we are told,
one that could destroy us completely: it is the doctrine that our happiness and
success could depend on something or someone.
It is the lie that we have to live up to satisfy the expectations of our
parents. Parents may hurt us in many ways – sometimes and quite often with the
best of intentions – and they aren’t even aware that the small insult they tell
us could constitute a barrier to our personal growth. At times they set very
high expectations about our educational achievement, and some even force their
kids to succeed where they failed. “You’ll grow up to be a fine sailor,” they
say. And so saying, they start laying the foundations for a future of a sailor.
The businessman saves a lot of money and prepares the child to be heir to the
family business. We may grow up without a dream, without actually falling in
love with something, which is an act of freedom and self-actualization, strung
up to achieve the dream papa has created for us. We are blinded to think that
what papa thought for us is the best and we simply bow to it. We do not realize
that we can’t really fit papa’s shoes. Papa only thinks the best of us and
believes that the shoe will fit properly because he feels comfortable in it.
Experience has been what others have
told us: This thing isn’t for people like
you. Your family is poor. You couldn't finish college. Sadly we have believed what we have been
told, and transformed it into a credo by repeatedly saying it to ourselves
until our own voice identifies with it.
But we aren’t what we have been told. We aren’t what we have heard many
times, and we aren’t what happened to us in the past.
To discover who we really are and our
potential we have to start by stripping.
We need to remove every layer of your programming in order to see the
beauty of our nakedness. At that point,
we are left with the freedom to choose what we want to be.
So, don't be an imitation of the idea
others have of you. Remember that most
people will see you as they are, even those closest to you and those who wish
for your welfare. You have to work at
yourself to unveil your own truth, your legend, your originality.
The hurts, both intentional and
unintentional, can leave a lasting and false impression on us. Emotional hurts
come in different ways and they can affect our self-esteem and self-confidence
very negatively. One of the things that cause a lot of damage to our self-image
is rejection. It creates the deep sense that we are not wanted, hence we are
not worthy. Many of us live with buried emotional hurts. Some of us are not even
aware of those that are already buried in our unconscious mind, although they
have a strong hold on us. Whether it is a parent or a relative telling you that
you are not coming with them to a party, or the football coach looking at you
and saying offhandedly that you can’t be part of the team, or the person you
respect so much removing you from their friend list on Facebook, the rejection
– slight as it could be – hurts, and it can make you believe that you are the
person you aren’t, really.
Failure in the past can also make us
lose confidence in who we really are and in what we can become. We repeatedly
fail to achieve a specific goal; we can tend to believe that failure will
always await us in the future. This can be a crippling kind of feeling; it creates
fear, and makes us set ourselves up for failure. The situation doesn’t get any
better especially when someone we value has proclaimed us as a failure in the
past. I have heard parents who tell their kids that they are useless and that
they can’t be better than the neighbor’s kid. How insensitive some parents
could be, how overbearing! It can actually take a lot of effort for the child
to convince himself or herself that they are more than what their parents tell
them; that they are even more than everyone else when they follow their
personal path.
Emotional hurts and childhood traumas,
the lies they tell us, and the way parents treat us can make us have a glimpse
of a future that isn’t really ours. They make us create goals that aren’t meant
for us. It is in this way that we set out on the wrong road, and live in
constant stress struggling to figure out what society wants us to become.
Our culture and our well-designed
institutions also lie to us about who we can become. Each of us grows up with a
kind of model personality to follow. It could be our teacher, the person we
watch constantly on television, the music teacher, or that one person with whom
we have had a very meaningful and enriching encounter. We can get so fascinated
to the point of believing that we can be like that person.
You can have a lot of success, become
very rich, and enjoy many achievements, but if the dream you are living isn’t
yours, you’ll never experience self-fulfillment. Your success and achievement
must have been the fruits of a series of reactions to what experience told you,
to what others have told you, and to your personal hurts. So, stop allowing
people and events to define you. You can choose what to become by choosing your
values. You don’t need permission from anyone to be happy. You don’t need
permission to dream. You can explore your possibilities and choose yourself.
