Learning from Experience

"Experience is the name men give to their mistakes," I believe. The most painful experiences, for me, are not the obvious ones, such as losing a job. They are the loves lost, or the death of a family member or friends, sickness or even the agony of losing a boat race to Harvard or at Henley in England. I was the coxswain on crews for ten years. One always remembers the loves, the friends, the races lost. They stick in the hide, kin to death and dying.

I've never fit well enough into work that it took much out of me to lose it. I have not been invested in it enough. I have not found my calling. Losing a job is an insult, however, to one's ego. The harm of being under appreciated and under valued is incalculable, not for public display, something we learn to deal with over time. And then there is the self-laceration over having made the wrong choices, either vertent or inadvertent; it forever stings. Wait a moment. There are some divets, dents in the armor. Not having my book published after nearly two years of work was a shot to the jaw; I put my creative energies on the line and my "baby" was stillborn. The accumulative result is a form of erosion, an undermining of one's self-confidence. It can be corrosive, too. One can never lose self-confidence, "never let the bastards get you down." This is the law of the jungle. How could I have known most of what jumps out, sometimes obviously, after the fact? Who does not have 20/20 hindsight? Raise your hand! Putting all this aside. I remain an upbeat, positive, confident person. My time and purpose will surely come, on my schedule, no one else's. I am looking for my raison d'etre. When I look in the mirror, I surely feel something of the emotions of dejection and depression. The fact is, there is a lot of clinical depression in my family. The good news: are not creativity and depression a kind of hand and glove sort of deal? "You can't have one without the other." No: that's love and marriage, horse and carriage. Faced with such a choice, learning from one's mistakes or not, I'll take the former option, including the pain of the experience. "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved" my mother once told me. I can't wait until I find my way home. Or in George Harrison's words, ". . . if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."