Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

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Adam Shekleton Eng. 112 Sec. #71 5/6/07 Life is Learned

Nobody is perfect. If somebody was good at absolutely everything right from birth, then there would be no point in living at all. Life is, in the simplest of terms, about learning. From the time somebody is born until the time they die, they learn. Every single day something new is added to their range of knowledge.

The major idea behind the ideology of life simply being about learning is the actions that result from past experiences. That is, when a person experiences a certain situation, and it does not go the way that they would have liked it to, the next time that situation arises the person will make an adjustment so that it works out better for them. For most people, including myself, this is especially true when it pertains to relationships. This building on past experiences is what it takes to have a real and meaningful relationship. If something did not work out in one relationship, it will be changed the next time another relationship develops. Personally, I was in a relationship where I took a lot of little things for granted. This was one of the things that ended up causing the relationship to fall apart. It can safely be said that the next time I am with somebody, those kinds of things will not be taken for granted. Life is about learning from past experiences and building one’s personality and character because of this learning.

The way life works is that a person will do something and make a mistake. It is expected that the person will learn from that mistake and change for the next time. If, the next time, something else goes wrong, then it is again expected that that aspect will be changed. This is a continuous process until the situation ends up being exactly where that person would like it to be. This is why people who are older are said to be very wise. It is because they have gone through this process of learning and know how life works and also know how others will handle the situations that they were once in.

It is very important to remember, though, that the past cannot be dwelled upon. If this happens, then all of the learning that would come of it will be completely lost. The past has already happened and cannot be changed. It is much better to realize that it happened and work on improving the future rather than worrying about what went wrong last time. This is essentially what prevents people from going through this process of learning because they get so wrapped up in what happened that they don’t even realize where they are going anymore.

Life is learned. Everybody has to go through the process whether they like it or not. People get filtered in life not because of the type of knowledge that they learn in school but whether or not they can distinguish between dwelling on the past or learning from it and improving their future.