Our experiences shape us.
The things we encounter, learn, overcome, are the things that define us as individuals. These stepping stones are what help give us our skills, our talents, possibly even our families and careers. We experience love and it leads to a family, we experience knowledge and it leads to a career. Yet, in the most raw meaning of the word, we truly form to our experiences.
The things we fear are most often due to experience. Whether it be our own, our peers, or a stranger’s on television, we feel fear through others experiencing misfortune or anguish. We develop our own reservations in regards to specific things. We may fear the embarrassment of failure, or simply failure itself. We need to learn to turn this fear into fuel, to realize that failure is simply a hurdle on the path to success. Without failure, we never truly know how impacting a win can be.
In a more literal sense of Maya’s words, we mustn’t let ignorance outline our actions. Far too often do we hear of one’s ignorance, the lack of knowledge on a subject, yet far less often do we hear their plans to change it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, it took generations to learn how and why the civilization was one of the most powerful in the world. The experiences of those before led to stronger armies, stronger walls, and a stronger reputation.
We must use the mistakes and downfalls of those before us to improve out reality. Never before have humans had such access to the successes and failures of those before us – libraries, wikipedia, the internet as a whole. We can learn how to build a birdhouse in minutes from a YouTube video, or how to make a proper beef wellingtown through the lense of Tasty. Yet we so often fail to force ourselves to do better with what we’ve been given, what we’ve experienced.
We must remember to take our stumbles and turn them into forward momentum.
Deconstructed Echos 