Experience, The Best Teacher
It is said that experience is the best teach and also, the worst teacher. Many wise people I met concurred to this saying. Its amazing how many things we have all learnt from good and bad experiences...
One major reason why the lessons learnt from experience stick for almost forever is probably because it's lessons comes from the mistakes we make, our trial and error and sometimes, the painful situations we face.
Its ironic how most of us don't heed the advice of the experienced elderly/young person untill we find ourselves in the same situation they advice us against. Most times, experience is actually the best teacher for stubborn people.
Many people have grown to a very good extent, all thanks to the many lessons experience taught them. These lessons has shaped them into becoming wise people and their wisdom can be used to not only impact themselves, but the society at large.
This post is an entry for Hive Reachout Weekly prompt titled Lessons From Experience. In this post, I will write about a time when I refused to heed the advice of an experience person and later learnt the same thing in a painful manner. Here goes..
Where I'm from, we have a saying: "If you warn a child not to put their hands on fire and they insist on putting their hands there, allow them to touch the fire and feel how painful the heat can be. When they experience it, they will not go close to fire again."
To an average person, this may sound cruel, but then, growing in a Nigerian home, I learnt the hard way. Most times, from experience. Trial and error per se.
Another saying we have where I'm from is that: "He who has nobody to advice him, should always put his ears on the floor to listen to the advice that was given to another person." In every words that is contained in an advice lays multiple strings of experience. You just have to look deep.
I was one that always trust easily. I grew up in the Northern part of Nigeria where we don't really care about petty things. We trust easily and share everything irrespective of how hard things are. This mindset remained with me until I traveled back to the eastern part of Nigeria, my village.
I arrived with this mindset, thinking that everyone was also like that. My mom warned me to minimize how I trust people but I thought she had issues with the villagers and was trying to deprive me the joy of having fun with my village brothers.
Welp, things went smoothly for a couple of months. Due to the fact that we came back newly, we were the talk of the town. I was famous like a celebrity and the whole thing was just making my head big. I thought I was loved, not knowing that the love they had for me was because of the material things I have them every now and then.
Time flew, my pocket got dried. Gradually, I began to understand that these people don't really want to make me their friend. Even though I was part of them, they didn't really accept me because I was raised in the North. They didn't like Northerners that much because of the many history of violence.
People I trusted turned their back on me. Gradually, everything slipped. I was all by my self. Welp, I had my brothers though but then, it was really an eye opener. Many other things happened along the line though.
The entire experience taught me a lot of lessons about the people I choose to trust. I got to understand that trusting somebody blindly could spell doom for me. That experience has been helping me ever since then, up until now and I'm really glad I had it.
Thank you for reading.
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