Have you noticed that a lesson sticks better when you experience something? We need to do, we need to feel, we need to experience in order to get it. With a skill it's more obvious - you can't learn to cook by reading a cookbook, it remains theoretical. Ultimately you have to get into the kitchen and do it. You have to get into the water to learn how to swim, watching a movie about swimming is not enough.
The concept is a bit more abstract when it comes to projections and possible implications. If you have twenty people over for Thanksgiving some planning ahead is a must so everything is ready when your guests sit down for dinner. This requires projections you can make based on your own experience.
When it comes to far reaching ideas, however, when we need to rely on others, experts, scientists, it seems to me that we are not so good at accepting projections, that oftentimes we have to experience first in order to get it, to act, to make a change. I am thinking about two examples. One is proactive wellness and the other is climate change.
In a documentary about his career Chef Dan Barber mused about the early hardships on his path to fame and concluded that adversity teaches us where we don't want to go back to. Is it wisdom that might prevent us from having to go through an actual experience to avoid hardship? Is it trust in someone else's scientific truth? Is it distinguishing fact from fiction? Not sure. Sometimes we need to experience illness before concluding we'd rather be healthy and decide to eat a better diet in the future.
What is it with climate change? There are still many skeptics out there who don't believe in the scientific compilations and observations by so many reputable organizations. Maybe we'll need to experience the dire consequences of our inaction, the more frequent droughts, the more pronounced weather instabilities and implications for our agriculture, the global warming and projected migration of millions of people from the global South, the torrential rains and storms, the more massive snowfalls, the melting of the icecaps, the submersion of coastal areas and low lying islands. All already going on in real time right now.....does it need to get worse? What are your thoughts?