Experience is the comb life gives you

Luky;
You cannot create experience, you must undergo it, said the French writer Albert Camus in his Notebooks, published in 1962. In these eight simple words he revealed an extremely unpalatable and disturbing truth.


Parents all over the world strive night and day to inculcate their hard-won wisdom into the unreceptive heads of their babies, toddlers and teenagers. Mostly their labours are in vain. Few people want to learn from the experience of others. Humanity is an inquisitive breed, always trying to get to the nub of the problems that abound, not by sidestepping these but by steeping themselves in them. We seem to have a need to learn from experience.


A British writer, Aldous Huxley, went one step further than Camus. "Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you," he wrote. The courts abound with offenders whose records show that they have been arrested for the same crimes over and over again. However, the average person is very often frightened off crime forever, once he or she has had a skirmish with authority. 


Daniel Boorstin, an American, wrote of this in the New York Post in the seventies. "The messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life." True enough, our mistakes often land us in a muddle. When an experience has cost one dear, however, it is often the resultant mess which convinces one not to repeat the error.


It could save children so much later anguish if only they followed their parents' sage advice when they were young but, as John Steinbeck says: "I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone's experience which is probably why it is so freely offered." 


What is the dearest lesson experienced by me and the one among all which I perennially find hardest to learn? To sit tight and watch the young people in my life make one mistake after another without yielding to the temptation of putting them back on the right path with a few well-chosen words.


Maybe I never will learn to keep quiet and let my children make their own mistakes without trying to interfere. Or will I learn to do so when it is too late and they themselves have all turned old and grey? 
It's not impossible, for, as Judith Stern puts it: "Experience is a comb life gives you after you lose your hair."


*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette. Aren't the mother and foal beautiful?