This is not a blog

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Re: Wandering 

Here is a comment I got in the mail back in April from a reader. I wanted to post it here, but since I believe I should have asked for his permission first, I'm going to keep his name private for the moment...

Bonjour Dotty,

Very interesting your thoughts. And you can make yourself clearly understood.

As you said you do not have the answer to the question whether you learn by experience or not. I do not pretend to have the answer to this riddle, however, coming from a totally different background than you, I take the liberty to say something about it.

We learn from experience, everybody knows that. But if you have some imagination, you might be able to think about dangerous or unpleasant situations and try thus to avoid them, before they actually happen.

Unfortunately, experience is not everything. Imagine you live in a house with a low doorstep. You might learn - the hard way - to bend a bit when entering so as not to bang your head. Nevertheless, it will happen, from time to time, in spite of your experience. Boum, bang! It does not mean you are stupid but only that you are a human being and not a goddam machine.

You say, you have a tendency to repeat mistakes.As you do not give any example, nothing specific can be said about that. There are mistakes, you are not supposed to make, not even once. For instance, my hobby is paragliding. I am supposed to control my harness fixtures before taking off.. If I make the mistake of not controlling this I am dead. So I have to control this point, any time, Total interdiction not to control!! But there are other things, minor ones, where I repeat old mistakes, because it is not so important and because I am a goodam human being, not a machine.

Last thing: there are mistakes you can hardly avoid making because of your character, your upbringing, your internal structure. You have to live with those ones. No need to consult Doctor Freud. And no need to be upset, that's you, old Dotty, alive and kicking. As the French say: "Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop". Meaning, some mistakes have a tendency to come back. You have got to live with them.