Experience Creates Great Learning Opportunities

Picture your most vivid memory. The one that is somehow almost always at the back of your mind. Take it out and let it envelop your thoughts entirely. Then, take a step back and look at it objectively.

What do you see?

When I was much younger, I loved to play with water. It was like my best friend. I didn`t know how to swim, or dive into it, but I did know how to use it for a lot of things.

In my childhood, the children who could afford water guns were assumed to be of a wealthier background than everyone else. As thus, water playing activities normally centred around pranks, splashing and washing dolls up in a basin of water. We pretended the basin was an ocean or a really big pool.

As we aged, we were discouraged from doing all those things. It was thought of as something only children in early primary school and nursery could do. It vexed me to no end about this, and I usually got in trouble for breaking the rules.

It wasn`t until I went to boarding school that I understood just how important water was. My school was located in an area where we relied on rain water and boreholes to shower, do laundry and stay hydrated. Due to limited supply of properly treated water, a lot of people shared water bottles and drank whatever they could from the bottom of their buckets or basins.

Normally, these buckets and basins were left open in the air until late in the afternoon/early evening for pupils to pick them up. This scenario became common place even in high school. From then on, we had to learn how to use water carefully.

Stepping back, one can see that a resource like water has two sides to it. This is the beauty of life. There`s a flip side to everything. On one hand, the water was a relief to us, while on the other hand, water was dangerous due to all the diseases we could get from too much (bilharzia and malaria) or too little of it (typhoid and dehydration).

In the same way, life has two sides. There are mountains and valleys. One can choose to hate every experience, or to see the dark beauty hidden behind it. There is always a lesson you can learn from every experience you learn. For me, as a child, I learned that continued exposure to water could give me a cold, or even worse, pneumonia. I had to cut back on my water playing skills. Later on, I learned that water shortages too could cause disease.

This, in turn, has made me pursue ways to treat and store water for my own personal use. When I have a surplus, I can have it collected in a water drum or tank for future use when it is drier. Instead of drinking water right out of a well or spring, I can either use a water filter, or boil it after decanting it to get rid of the tiny particles at the bottom.

What about splashing about in a pool? Well, the best days to play with water or very hot and sunny days. That means you`ll get dry very quickly, and as thus, won`t have to worry about developing the flu.

See, combining life experiences with education can really be cool. You should do it more often, even in more complex scenarios.

I hope you learned something from my experience.