Experience

Aldous Huxley said “Experience is not what happens to a man: it’s what a man does with what happens to him.” We all have experiences, however what matters is how we handle them. Our relationship with our experiences shape who we are. They mold us into the person people see. We can either let a bad experience affect us negatively or we can learn from it and make it a positive in our lives. Many people attribute what is negative about them to what they’ve experienced in the past. For example, my parents didn’t show me any love and that’s why I have a hard time expressing it. Why not look at it a different way? Why not say that because of it you show as much love as you can? As a child I didn’t know it, however now with hindsight, I can see that my father didn’t like me very much. I don’t know why, maybe I reminded him too much of himself. I didn’t let those experiences when he showed a dislike for me shape me negatively. I let it teach me a lesson, and now I don’t show dislike for anyone that I meet. I have turned it into a positive. Start learning from your experiences in a positive way. Even the worst experience can have something good come of it. It may not seem that way at the time, but down the road it will. So actively choose how an experience shapes you. Think about it before it gets to be a negative and turn it around into a positive.