Hello, and welcome back to The Thoughts that Bind! This post is really going to be a general post, which I think is fitting given the topic at hand. But luckily, it’s something that we all can relate to. And that’s the idea that you’re never really going to be done with this life-learning thing.
What is wisdom?
I think we like to spread the idea that being a wise person in life means taking your life experiences and learning from them. Now, that doesn’t mean squeezing all you can out of your memories until they’re a lifeless, ruminated pulp, and you’re a quivering, anxious, overthinking little blob, sobbing in the dark corner. Obviously you can try to get too much out of your life experience which can inhibit your moving forward in life, which is just as unwise as not examining your life to begin with. I think we can all agree on that. (Read this piece about saying yes to life, or this one about building a new identity if you need help with that topic.)
But we generally think of being wise as learning from our challenges and mistakes in life, and moving forward in better ways. Healthier ways, that cause more peace and harmony with our peers, loved ones, and the world around us. A big part of this perception seems to be not making the same mistakes again.
A mistake made twice…
And listen, I’m not saying to go out and make mistakes on purpose. (That would make them no longer mistakes, after all.) But I think we have a wonky perspective on mistakes in general. We listen with admiration to the wise man who says he never makes the same mistake twice and think “ah, yes, how true” when somebody waxes poetic about how a mistake made twice is a choice. It makes us feel better about cutting off people who repeatedly hurt us.
But a mistake made twice is not necessarily a choice. And you’re probably going to keep making some of the same mistakes repeatedly in your life, even if you’re one of the people who prides themselves in not doing so. A lot of this, one might argue, can be contingent on the individual grasping the mistake they’ve made. And that’s fair enough—if you don’t recognize a behavior as a mistake, you’re not going to know to correct for it in the future. You’ll probably write it off as an external circumstance and not be aware when the signs are appearing that it’s coming back again. That being said, I don’t think that’s all there is to it.
Life is a circle
The funny thing is that life doesn’t actually just stop handing you things because you “learned your lesson”. I think that’s one of the myths that we like to tell ourselves and each other to feel a greater semblance of control about what comes to us. And when we look at the lives of others, we can see evidence of it.
For instance, in the case of toxic relationships. We may look at someone who used to be a doormat. Someone who has since decided they will not let people treat them poorly. And we can observe in their life, they don’t have toxic relationships. But that’s not by sheer virtue of them having learned so much as it is that whenever someone new who treats them badly comes around, they bring out their tools and shut it down. So it won’t get very far with them and they certainly won’t get involved enough with the person who treats them badly to have enough of a connection to call a relationship.
It’s not so much that life stops giving you these same problems once you learn. It’s that once you have integrated the lesson into your habits and into your being, you know what to do so you don’t lose yourself in the same problems. You see an issue, and you head it off at the pass because you now know what to do and how to follow through with it.
Maintenance
It’s for this reason that I think of wisdom more as the maintenance of the lessons you learned. You can’t get a big head and think “I’m smarter than that now, I’ve learned my lesson” because that won’t avoid or fix the problem. No, instead you have to remember you’re still just human. You’ve learned a lesson, and that’s great! Now you continue to keep an awareness of this lesson, and stay in top shape.
Sometimes we get lazy. Especially when we see the fruits of our labor. Take the person who feels the need for a “diet cheat day” because they lost five pounds or the person who skips the gym because they’ve been pretty good about it lately and one day won’t hurt. Or even the person who has a good relationship with their partner, so they don’t worry so much about thanking them for working hard.
You need to rest. You can’t let any one thing or idea take up all your time, energy, and attention. And no, taking the rest you need won’t ruin stuff. (Read more about rest and the different types here.) But there is a line between rest and simple laziness or procrastination. And sometimes it’s sneakier than your realize. Real lessons, habits, and skills take maintenance. You don’t want to get rusty. And sometimes life gets in the way.
Falling into old habits
This is largely why we make the same mistakes, over and over again in our lives. Things get in the way. We’re all prone to certain kinds of unfavorable behaviors, whether those are things that make it difficult to have good relationships with others, or even just keep us from achieving our own person goals. Everybody’s got them. And when we get stressed, or put too much attention on other aspects of being, these things can get forgotten about and fall into neglect.
Obviously, one of the things that we want to do in life is become better. We all have different strengths and weaknesses and goals, so we’re going to be working on different things. But ultimately, we all have things that we would like to change about ourselves. And I don’t want you to be discouraged—change is possible! I have, in fact, been able to change some things about my own nature over the years. One of the most notable is my penchant for messiness, which you can read about in my three part series starting here.
But here’s the thing about that. Some things you’re able to completely change about yourself. Some things, you just can’t set and forget. Without that maintenance, they come creeping back in. And that’s actually okay.
The beauty of making the same mistakes
As much as it can be frustrating to see yourself reverting to the same old issues, there’s a lot of good that can come from it. First of all, as I mentioned briefly, it’s very humbling. It can be easy to get a big head when you think that you’ve just got everything under control, and you can change every aspect of yourself at will. Seeing the old behaviors coming back will show you that no, you’re not as cool and guru-y as you thought. But beyond that, it’s actually an excellent lesson about yourself and the world around you.
Maybe you learned a lot about yourself when you first got rid of that bad habit or that tendency toward a characteristic you don’t like. But when it came back, it probably didn’t come back all at once. It’s interesting to look back at the breadcrumb trail and see how you got here. It shows you where your blind spots have been.
Why didn’t you catch it sooner? Can you see how it was building up until this moment when you finally noticed it? What has caused this behavior or habit to come back into your life? We can examine our feelings and circumstances for greater understanding of how our brains really work, both emotionally and logically. And next time, we’ll have more tools and more signposts to navigate how we’re doing.
Addictions
I think many times people with addictions can take this process too personally. This is probably because most of their peers and society in general has also labeled their behavior as “bad”. But if you are someone struggling with an addiction relapse, remember this: one relapse does not define you or your future. And while it is true, your addiction is problematic, you are not alone, and you are not broken.
There are other people who are going through the same things as you, that’s true. But even those who have recovered or those who never were “addicted” to anything in the first place have the same fundamental struggle that is part of the human condition.
We’re all trying to be better people. We keep making the same mistakes and trying to learn from them and well, cut it out, ultimately. And sometimes, they crop back up. None of that can take away the lessons you’ve learned or the progress you’ve made.
That old staircase analogy
I’ve heard that life is like a spiral staircase. That as you learn a lesson, you keep moving forward and up, but then you’ll arrive back at where you started, just a level up. I think this idea helps some people understand what we’re getting at here, but the more I think about it, the more I’d put it a different way. There is no staircase, there are no stairs. There are no levels or achievements. And you’re not better if you have this perfect streak of successes stacked on top of each other, although that’s what we’ve been convinced to think we’re building.
It’s not like a block tower where if you pull the bottom block out, it all falls to the ground. Nothing, and I mean nothing can rob you of your past successes. And no new success can make them more than they were back then. Ultimately, our only aim here is to build an understanding. To learn different tools to deal with old and new issues, so that in the future, when we see something similar, we can pull out the old maps, and work from there. And when we encounter a new issue, we pull out our tools first. One might not be equipped for the job, but then we can look at the next.
It’s more like being the metaphorical handyman of your life. As you get older, you’ll gain experience. You’ll see things that you may have seen before, and it’ll make fixing them easier. But when you come across something you haven’t seen, your tools and understanding of how things generally work will make you better equipped anyway.
No shame, it’s just life
If you’re someone who has an easily bruisable ego, it’s going to be hard to accept that you’ll continue to make mistakes. But you know, it’s just life. None of us get out of here alive, and none of us can live it without making mistakes.
It’s important to surround yourself with people who are able to accept that from you, that human level of less-than-perfection. But it’s even more important for you to be able to accept that from yourself. In everything you do, you’re going to make some mistakes. Perfection, being that it doesn’t exist, isn’t even something you can strive for. (Read the problem with perfection here.)
Do your best
But you know what you can always strive for? Your real and true personal best. It won’t always be enough. But it will always be all that you can give.
And the funny thing about your best is that it isn’t linear. You know, sometimes you’ll look at it and think “is that seriously all I can give right now?” But if it is, then give that. Give that, and move on. Because ruminating is not worth it.
You can read more about your best and how to know if you’re really giving it in this post. But more than anything, I want to thank you for reading my thoughts and being here with me today. If you’ve found yourself back making your old mistakes, give yourself some grace.
I am excited for the new lessons you’ll get to learn from this experience, and want to encourage you to remember why you were striving for this goal to begin with. The fact is that whenever someone puts in a big effort and succeeds in personal change, it’s because they had a big inspiration in the first place. And you can maintain that, even when your circumstances change. I’ve been through it myself, on occasion. I wish you well on this next leg of your journey. If you like what I had to say, consider subscribing to the blog and sharing it with someone who needs this message today. Let us know in the comments: what’s a lesson that you had to learn more than once?
