Diversity of Experience

When I was younger, one of my high school teachers had a small, framed motivational poster that read “Experience is the best teacher, but the tuition is costly,” for some reason or another that always struck me. At first looking at it made me annoyed, I thought it just another one of those quotes claiming that younger people know absolutely nothing and older, more experienced individuals knew everything. As a teenager, nothing was more irritating than individual looking down on you and minimizing your abilities due to your age; however, as time went on I realized that it didn’t necessarily mean that.

My older sister died in a car accident in October of my senior year of high school. She had been my life line and I felt completely lost without her; to be honest, sometimes I still feel lost without her. We had both struggled with mental health issues in high school we understood each other in a way that most of the people around us were unable to. We lived in the same house, experienced many of the same struggles, and we experienced each other’s pain. It wasn’t until after my sister died that I looked at that little, framed quote completely differently. Perhaps a more powerful version of that quote is one by C.S. Lewis stating, “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” As much as I have always been hesitant to admit, books and academic knowledge cannot teach you everything, and some things it teaches you it cannot teach you as thoroughly as experience can. For example, I can read and study all kinds of information about panic attacks, but nothing is more illuminating than actually experiencing one. Likewise, I can read about the grief an individual feels when they lose someone and I can even have someone explain it to me in detail, but I still couldn’t completely comprehend the pain of loss if I never lost someone myself. Furthermore, often times it is much more beneficial to learn about certain topics from people who have experienced it or by witnessing a situation for oneself. It isn’t about how old a person is, someone could live their entire lives and not experience certain things and others are given experiences at a young age.

I remember in high school reading the book Night, which is an autobiographical memoir written by Elie Wiesel about his experiences during the holocaust and no matter how many times I read it or how many times I visit the holocaust museum and stare in cold, numbing horror at the images of human suffering I will never fully grasp the suffering that these people went through because I have never experienced it. Maybe, it is our minds defense? We can’t fully understand certain kinds of pain unless we experience it because the very act of understanding causes us pain. This isn’t to say it is impossible to empathize so why bother; rather, I think that it is a testament to the importance of diversity in situations. I’m not only talking about ethnic diversity, though that is important as well, but a diversity of experience and knowledge. At some point in western society, we decided that success was a competition and we are so quick to reject any form of knowledge that cannot be obtained conventionally because it means that someone has some form of natural advantage over us. In the end, why can’t we all succeed together? I understand the push of individualism, but acknowledging each other’s differences and using these differences to make changes that are beneficial to the collective does not minimize individual efforts.