Snapshots and Visions: A View from the Now

 I’m not just talking about simple physical changes, here.  Those changes are not that important, really. They’re going to happen, one way or another, whether we are conscious of them or not.  I’m talking about psychological, emotional and spiritual changes – the kinds of changes, for instance, that mold children into mature, emotionally balanced adults.  Each of us, by the time we hit senior citizenship, will have made countless choices and agonized over millions of decisions.  We tend to think of them as either good or bad.  Some of them led to happy, productive, constructive events.  Others got us into a world of trouble.

But from the perspective of age, every choice was good in this sense: it offered the opportunity to learn something.  Right or wrong, good or bad, whatever the consequences that followed our decision, we learned from what we have done.

That kind of learning is called experience.  That’s all experience is – living through the consequences of choices and remembering what happened.