Have you ever felt like you’ve made the same mistake over and over again? You choose the same path, but expect different results. I call this “lesson learned”.
As I listen to Alicia Keys sing her version of “Lesson Learned” it reminds me so much of the decisions I’ve made in my relationships. She sings “you give it one more chance just like the time before, but he already knows you’ll give a hundred more”. How many times do you have to experience the broken heart before you realize that the relationship is not working and doesn’t look like it’s going to be working anytime soon? You give so much of yourself and you hold on to the hope that this time it will be different, this time it wasn’t in vain. But it’s never different; it always ends up the same, you hurting. So why again this time, why did you give him another chance? Did you think this time there was a light at the end of the tunnel, your relationship would blossom, and your mate will be all that you hoped him to be? Why do you keep falling in this same deadly web of games, of lies? Was this all a waste of your time? Consider it a lesson learned.
One thing that I have learned about mistakes is we live and we learn. Sometimes it takes some longer to learn the same lessons in life. Sometimes we have to completely fall and hit the ground before we recognize that there is a lesson to be learned. Sometimes we fall, hit the ground, and have to be hit over the head and still only recognize that there MAY be a problem, there MAY be a lesson we are suppose to be learning. Life has a funny way of beating you up, and what’s worse is we have an even funnier way of beating ourselves up; we can be our own worst critics. What we all have to realize is that mistakes are going to be made. Unfortunately there’s a school, called “Hard Knocks” that we all have attended, no matter how much we’ve attempted to graduate or avoid it. A lot of lessons are learned through experience. Consider this, as a child when you first started learning to ride a bike, you had to experience falling before you realize that there’s a balance that keeps you stable, steady on your bike ride. If you lean too far to the left, you fall. If you lean too far to the right, you fall. The key is the balance. But without the experience of falling, you would have never figured that out.
In life, these lessons that we go through are our teaching tools. Over time, we are going to grow from our experiences, we learn from our mistakes. It’s the experiences in life, and how we handle them, which mold us to who we are developing to be, we are constantly evolving. So next time you feel you’ve made a mistake; you’ve accepted that man back; you chose the wrong path yet again; don’t feel discouraged, but rather encouraged. You recognizing your mistakes are HUGE first steps in your growth. You can’t expect to walk before you crawl, nor run before you walk. Understanding we all make mistakes, learn from them, and at that point we will begin building the strength to change it. The worst thing that we could ever do to ourselves is harp on our mistakes, that will only tear us down by breaking our self esteem. We have to have self confidence to make the changes, to growth. No one is perfect.
