Every action you take sends ripples out and changes the world. That sounds pretty grandiose, particularly if we live isolated lives. But we don’t.
A client who doesn’t pay on time causes me to use the experience to write up a stricter contract with a clause that charges interest. Maybe a potential client, one who pays well, avoids me because of that.
A relationship that falls apart through a breaking of trust causes the hurt person in the relationship to be more guarded in the next relationship.
The pain you experience in life gets passed on to the next, often innocent, party. The person who has shown every reason to be trusted gets the brunt of the previous relationship–the one that broke down. Is that what experience is?
Questions I wonder about:
1. Does this happen with good experiences, too? Do I remove the interest clause when a client pays on time? (Probably not. I’ll see that as an aberration, still believe in the “norm” of the non-paying client set.)
2. How does experience change how we see the world–and does it always have to be protective or negative?
3. Is there a personal statute of limitations on a bad experience? How many people in our lives have to pay for the one who hurt us?
––Quinn McDonald wonders about the emotional experience of how we expect the world to treat us.
QuinnCreative 