Inner Truth: Learn from Mistakes

There's a Santa’s joke. It goes like this – “After seeing a banana peel on road, Santa says 'Oh… now I have to fall down again!'” The element of humour here being that Santa is so dim that he lacks the basic human ability to learn from experience or mistakes. Give it a deep thought and to your surprise you will find it is true. We keep repeating almost the same mistakes again and again. Leave aside the question of wisdom of learning from others’ mistakes; if that would have been possible then graphic videos of accidents caused due to traffic rule violations would have turned us into staunch abiders of traffic rules. The point here is how many times in life after facing the consequences of our own mistake do we come out enriched with the learning of not repeating that mistake again…

Examples are umpteen. A friend of mine runs out of fuel on the road very often and ends up pushing his bike sweating all the way to the nearest petrol pump. One fractured hand and six stitches on the forehead are not enough to stop my cousin from riding bike after drinking. Yes, merely experiencing the serious repercussions of our mistakes does not make us wiser; we have to keep imprinting that learning into our conscious mind. It is these accumulated learnings over the years that turn us into  wise, mature and enlightened persons, who are less prone to make mistakes.

To err is human, but every mistake teaches us something and provides an opportunity to improve ourselves, so that we can be careful enough to avoid making the same mistake in the future. Whether we utilise this opportunity to learn from mistakes or not lies in our hands. 

The author is a reader of dna

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