Is experience the name we give to every mistake which we realized we made in the first place? Is it something inevitable that happens in everyone’s life? These questions have often come to my mind, but I always conveniently told myself that, whatever the term experience is actually, one thing which is forever true if you believe in destiny, god etc is that every experience you have is designed to make you stronger and better. This statement would definitely make you feel better especially when you have just realized that you had a disgusting experience. But think about it, most experiences we have are a result of our own actions, mind you I am not talking about those unforeseen circumstances where there is nothing much you can do except face the situation and if you survive, name that situation an experience and move on. But what about several situations and problems we get into due to our own ignorance or carelessness or mistake? We still conveniently call them experiences.
I know I have myself mentioned the word experience in many of my blog posts. Experience is not just what I wrote above. If you were to look at definition for psychology, as I understand, it is a sort of learning our brain has undergone due to exposure to something. This is the definition which will help us when we are talking about being experienced in doing something, like in jobs, or technologies etc. Now here again, we could categorize experience into first-hand experience, second-hand experience and even third hand experience. In one line, first-hand experience is the experience you get when you are the direct subject of the experience; second hand experience is the experience you get when you are an indirect subject of the experience. However third hand experience is not the best, though it could still be put to good yes, provided you take it in the right spirit. This is the experience which we could get by reading or hearing or witnessing the experience that someone has gone through directly or indirectly, and where we had literally nothing to do. Example of this could be, like getting knowledge by reading autobiographies of people.
In terms of psychology, my knowledge about experience is pretty much limited. But from little knowledge I have, I believe, experiences we have could be physical or mental or emotional experiences. As such, though I have categorized experience into three categories, yet what we need to know is that either one of these experiences affects altogether. I mean to say for example a physical experience could affect us emotionally and mentally too.
No matter how much we categorize or define experiences. Like everything else, an experience can be put to good use in the future if we decide to, and should always be looked upon as a learning as opposed to sulking, rethinking and replaying the experience over and over with multiple different idealistic scenarios is going to lead us nowhere. By the look who is talking about this. I know I might not be the best person to talk about experience, but the fact that I am a human being gives me enough right to talk about this. Come on, even cave man became a civilized man through experience and not overnight.
Labels: experience