EXPERIENCE IS A GREAT TEACHER
EXPERIENCE IS A GREAT TEACHER
Penned by Oscar Wilde ,this quote hardly holds true ,when taken for its translation literatim .While Oscar Wilde was a great epigrammatic essayist, playwright and poet in his own right , one may observe his thoughts , his portrayal of human nature with its subtleties ,to be suffused with cynicism and highly flawed. His “mistakes”, which notably include falling in love with Alfred Douglas, earned him –reputation of a dissolute pervert, a highly publicized trial, and a term in the prison- and nearly finished him as a writer. Still after his death, Douglas described him as, “greatest force of evil that has appeared in Europe in last 350 years.”Hardly an experience, right?? Unless somehow we could ask Wilde , sitting in heaven or hell, what difference it made to him.
The point here is, no event in life, success or failure, or any mistake has any meaning in the larger scheme of life unless it makes you ruminate over where it all went wrong. Mistakes become experiences by what we choose to do with them, whether we choose to forget about them ,or learn from them and emerge as enlightened beings .Hence, certainly, experience is hardly an alias for a mistake, or had it been marriages would have been banned ages ago, and love would have become a dream too distant for many.
And why just mistakes, your encounters with success provide you with credibility especially after you’ve had a fair share of failures. Edison once said, “I’ve not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” But imagine for a fleeting moment, even the 10,001th attempt had failed, what importance would Edison hold in our life, or how would his failures have helped others? Or, what if he continued repeating the mistakes over and over again for thousands of times? None of this would have made Edison the man we know today.
The fountain of life can become a river of joy only when the myriad experiences of life and the lessons learnt, stand the test of
Penned by Oscar Wilde ,this quote hardly holds true ,when taken for its translation literatim .While Oscar Wilde was a great epigrammatic essayist, playwright and poet in his own right , one may observe his thoughts , his portrayal of human nature with its subtleties ,to be suffused with cynicism and highly flawed. His “mistakes”, which notably include falling in love with Alfred Douglas, earned him –reputation of a dissolute pervert, a highly publicized trial, and a term in the prison- and nearly finished him as a writer. Still after his death, Douglas described him as, “greatest force of evil that has appeared in Europe in last 350 years.”Hardly an experience, right?? Unless somehow we could ask Wilde , sitting in heaven or hell, what difference it made to him.
The point here is, no event in life, success or failure, or any mistake has any meaning in the larger scheme of life unless it makes you ruminate over where it all went wrong. Mistakes become experiences by what we choose to do with them, whether we choose to forget about them ,or learn from them and emerge as enlightened beings .Hence, certainly, experience is hardly an alias for a mistake, or had it been marriages would have been banned ages ago, and love would have become a dream too distant for many.
And why just mistakes, your encounters with success provide you with credibility especially after you’ve had a fair share of failures. Edison once said, “I’ve not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” But imagine for a fleeting moment, even the 10,001th attempt had failed, what importance would Edison hold in our life, or how would his failures have helped others? Or, what if he continued repeating the mistakes over and over again for thousands of times? None of this would have made Edison the man we know today.
The fountain of life can become a river of joy only when the myriad experiences of life and the lessons learnt, stand the test of