It has been my experience that action usually creates “dust” – or evidence of activity – however, not all action leads to progress. Sometimes this falls into the category of keeping oneself busy because one is too fearful to face the rigors of a truly adventurous life of discovery.

A few years ago, there was a morning when I awoke terrified by the looming day and all that it held. I was in a place where it seemed the Universe was pounding me for every poor choice and questionable decision that I had made to that point in my life.

As I looked back on the previous decade, it seemed that at every opportunity where I had a choice to make I made the wrong selection.

At that moment I realized that I needed to change my thought processes, the direction my life was taking, the path I was walking, some of the individuals I had chosen as traveling companions and many philosophies by which I had planned my journey.

I realized that the little cottage I had built so carefully out in the middle of the plain and surrounded with a wall and mote to keep life out was the very thing that had attracted the attention and wrath of everything that I had feared. I realized in an instant that I had spent years building motes and walls – hiding from life hoping it would not find and hurt me again. However, it did.

I learned that life does not treat kindly those who attempt to hide from it.

Fortunately, I had placed the responsibility for my predicament squarely where it should have been – on me. I knew that I was solely responsible for my miserable situation. I alone had been the one behind the wheel of my little jalopy as it careened out of control ending up at the bottom of some lonely, hot, and dusty ravine leaving me bloodied, desperate, and thirsty. I was running scared – terrified of life – and I was old enough to know better.

When I was younger, my grandfather would often ask me “if I’d learned anything valuable?” He would usually bring this up after I had a hard lesson. He was not one to give a lot of direction before hand, however, he was brilliant at helping me see the lessons in my experiences and how the choices I made affected the outcomes in those situations.

One day, just before I was to leave for college when we had finished working in the field moving the bales of hay into a stack, he asked me if “I had gained three years of experience in High School or had merely had one year’s experience three times?” I didn’t fully understand this question until a few years passed and I had heard it from many other people in other contexts. The importance of learning from my experiences has since been a critical principle as I’ve traveled my path in life.

How about you? Are you hiding from life or are you learning new things? Having new adventures? Making new discoveries? About yourself? About others? About the world around you? About how you fit into the universe? Does your life and living mean something? What? Too whom? Most importantly, are you happy?

I have found that satisfaction and happiness in my life is tied directly to new journeys of adventure and discovery.

There is perhaps nothing that I dislike more than covering the same ground over and over and over again. I like new things! I like experiences that cause me to grow. I like learning new things that force me to reconsider all that I believe. I like to be interrupted, awakened from my habit-induced fog, encouraged to see everything in a new light. I like action that causes progress for that is the only way our perspective will change and we will gain wisdom. I believe that wisdom is the result of a life well lived. Living to learn is the only way we can truly learn how to live.

In my opinion, there is only one time when the mere action of causing dust might cause some progress. That is when one might revisit some experience or something that happened in the past, dust it off and bring it out into the light of day and deal with it. There are times when it is important to visit the dark corners of one’s mind and reconsider past choices and the results. I certainly do not advocate one doing this until it becomes a manic obsession. Revisiting the past to learn from it should be a “weekend visit with old friends to reminisce about things fond, shared, but mostly forgotten,” not to “move into an old house haunted by every mistake we have made.”

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history,” is an old yarn used by those who love the study of History. I believe that is a true observation.

Applied personally, do we really learn from our own unique, individual “history?”

Have we had three years experience or have we had one years experience three times?

I believe these are important questions to consider as we contemplate change and progress in our lives.

Russ Bethers, March 2010

All material COPYRIGHT© 2010, Russell R. Bethers, Offpoint, Inc., USA
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