Experience


Whats an experience?

 

Lerning in a complex world is all about having experiences and learning from them. But what are experiences. I guess they are everything we do everyday of our lives. Even when we are sitting quietly we are normally thinking about or sensing something, and when we are asleep we are experiencing dreams, although we may not remember them. But our richest experiences generally involve us doing things. They involve us in ‘being’ us and our experiences often involve other people’s experiences as well. And when we have had an experience we are different. 

Some experiences (our fantasies and dreams) are only in the mind but mostly they are the ways in which we interact with the world. Some experiences are more memorable than others. Some are extremely difficult and challenging. Some we would rather forget and some we want to remember for the rest of our lives and we frequently pull them into our consciousness because they make us happy or sad, or they excite, disturb or comfort us. Some experiences we remember in order to honour someone or something we have lost or to help us come to terms with a difficult situation. And some we replay over and over again in order to make better sense of something and learn to be a better person.

We think a lot about our experiences. They make us who we are. They give us knowledge that is full of feelings and they stay in our memories because of this.  Recognising, valuing, thinking about, making use of and playing with our own experiences is part of our identity. And sharing our experiences by telling a story is something that only humans can do. It’s the way we have grown knowledge and wisdom from the time we learnt to talk to each other. 

We are all experts in our own experiences and everyone of us holds knowledge rom experiences that no-one else has. Only we know how to access and use it. But often we don’t know how useful this knowledge is to someone else until we shared it and they won’t know how useful it is until they have discovered it. By sharing the knowledge that we have gained through experiences we participate in and encourage a world of emergence. Things happen just because our stories make sense to others or they trigger an original thought or feeling in someone else’s mind. In doing this we have changed their experience.

 

Please add your thoughts.

 

For a more learned explanation.

 

Norman