Experience

Experience is often something we hear thrown around when on the hunt for a job or searching for opportunities in your chosen profession.

In this context, we can understand that experience is something that we obtain over time, through problem solving, compromising, and hitting dead ends at work. Or simply, how long you have been working in the field you currently are in, and what opportunities you took on along the way.

However, this idea of experience is not just something we participate in at work.

Experience is a natural part of the human experience overall.

So, what makes an experience, an experience?

Nothing but the simple fact that it happened, and you lived through it.

Even now as we speak through the screen, we are experiencing. You are experiencing the effects of reading, listening, and learning, and I am experiencing the effects of writing, sharing, and excavating.

But what’s more important? The experience or the effects?

Well, my friends, in this case, we could call it a tie.

The experience itself is something that gives you purpose, love, and appreciate for the life you are living, maybe not so much in every moment with every given experience, but it is the act of living in this experience that is what makes the moment so important.

To further explain what I mean, lets try an exercise.

Throughout your day, take a moment and pause. Put whatever it is down that you are thinking about and look in front of you.

Where are you? What are you doing? Is there anyone with you?

This will help you identify the moment itself, like you would recall a memory of the first time you went on the swings, your mother and siblings taking turns pushing you higher and higher in the air.

That is the experience itself, and this helps create your character, and how you see and feel the world around, even in the present day.

What comes after the mention of the memory is known as the effect.

How do you feel now that you have remembered this moment? Do you feel happy? Do you feel sad? Do you remember what it was like to swing for the first time? Did you feel like you were on top of the world, or like a bird flying in the sky?

Chances are that this experience made you feel alive. A feeling you find yourself searching for again and again in other experiences throughout life.

This could spark the adventurous side out of you, and lead you to trying activities like rock climbing, bungee jumping, and jumping out of an airplane, to recreate that grand feeling.

Or this experience could have made you afraid. Afraid of the unknown and the blurred line between the familiar and the uncertain.

Later in your life, you might develop a fear of flying or of heights, stopping you from traveling long distances.

However, the latter can be changed both from the moment the fear takes place, and later in life.

Which is why it is so important to focus on the moment when it happens.

If you are caught up in everything else going on around during moments like these, and even everyday moments, you will find that you either long to have that moment again for you wished you could have really experienced it, or you will skew how you remember the moment for the rest of your life, tying too many emotions to the memory, rather than seeing it for what it truly was, and what it can be.

So, although my intention is not to frighten you into paying close attention to every little detail of everything that happens to you throughout your lifetime, I do intend to get you to slow down and pay attention to each moment as it unfolds and to move with them rather than against them.

A concept that not only shifts your mindset, but also increases your overall quality of life.

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What are some of your most life changing experiences or little moments in life that you enjoy the most? Let me know in the comments & feel free to share this post with anyone you feel needs a little bit of reminiscing!

Best,

Celina ❤