Learn From Experience

In Choosing Happiness, Stephanie Dowrich makes the astute observation that “your own life experience is the greatest teacher you will ever have” (p. 38). What does this insight tell us? Well, for one, it suggests that complaining about life is the wrong way to use our emotional energy. Rather than complain, we should embrace the events of the day because each one is a lesson for us. Weeks are lessons for us. Months are lessons for us. And years also provide lessons. The more we live the more we can learn.

Have you heard the saying “haven’t you learnt anything from your past mistakes?” That’s a phrase none of us wants to hear. But from time to time we get it slapped in our face after an alcohol fuelled altercation, a speeding or parking fine, a telling off from the boss for being late again on a Monday.

All these things could have been avoided had we learnt from our previous experiences. A Sufi shaykh makes the point that we can train ourselves to prevent the occurrence of certain negative outcomes. What we can do after some unfortunate incident is reflect on the situation this incident occurred in: the time, location, social environment (people one was with at the time of the incident).

Take the example of the boss telling you off for being late on Monday. It makes sense to think back on what happened on Sunday to identify possible causes or correlations for the lateness. For one, every few Sundays, you attend a social gathering at a friend’s townhouse. This friend invites several young men over to watch the Sunday night basketball game and drink lots of beer. Each time, despite telling your friend and the others present you want to leave the gathering at 10pm to be home and in bed by 11pm (to wake up at 6am the following morning), you end up giving in to their requests to stay until midnight.  

To apply the shaykh’s teaching, let’s break down the event:

Time: Sunday evening

Location: Friend’s townhouse

Social environment: friends

What can we conclude from the information above? Obviously, the friends are the problem. They do not seem to care about your responsibilities of having a job. It might be time to find new friends, ones whom you can enjoy spending a Sunday evening, and still be home in time to get plenty of sleep before the next work day.

Or is it that you have a problem, in that you do not want to disappoint your friends or seem unsociable by leaving early? You are worried about the impact it may have on your friendships. Thus, although being consciously aware of the time, feeling guilty even, you give in because the company is sweet and having a break from the day to day grind feels necessary. These are good people and have been friends for a long time. And we all know good friends don’t come so easy in life. But as time has gone on, lives have changed and responsibilities increased. Some friends are still living the bachelor life, others have kids, a mortgage repayment, and the circle of life to get through.

The upshot of the shaykh’s teaching is to look for patterns. Life is full of patterns. It is our job to be aware of them. Stephanie Dowrich says “once you recognise a pattern, it loses the power that it had while it was still unconscious” (p. 9). Isn’t it true sometimes that realisation of our habits comes as a shock? Sometimes it takes a nudge from someone else, and sometimes it’s inspired, but always a surprise. It usually sounds something like “I can’t believe I’ve been doing that all these years.” However, after the shock comes relief that we don’t need to suffer anymore, and excitement about how we’ll do things differently from now on.

Reflection and learning from life are gifts from God. May God enable us to reflect and learn. Aameen.