Great words from George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."
Great lesson too. I think one of the keys to learning from mistakes, is that we not only learn from our mistakes, but we also learn from the mistakes of others.
Let's start with the basics. What can we learn from Tiger Woods? Right, 18 holes in one day is plenty. Keep your balls out of the rough. Got it.
Seriously though, we can learn that infidelity will destroy you. Do you think anything about Tiger's life will ever be the same? His family is destroyed. His reputation is shot. Even his career has taken a significant hit.
Virtually every aspect of his life has been impacted by his actions. Not to mention the devastating impact on his wife and children.
What can we learn from our best friends or neighbors, who we just heard are getting a divorce? They had a "perfect" marriage didn't they? Clearly not. What went wrong? Complaincency? Boredom? Drifted apart? Infidelity? Instead of peering over the fence to snoop for gossip, why not learn the details and make sure the same thing isn't happening on your side of the fence?
What can we learn from ourselves? What have we done to upset, irritate or disappoint our partner? What really grinds her gears? How have we let her down in the past? Let's take those mistakes and turn them into something positive, by making sure they never happen again. Change our patterns by developing a mindset that says "I don't ever want to let her down again."
This is hard work guys. This is serious stuff. It takes commitment. Let's not blow it.
Stay in touch -
Mark
PS - please pass this link along to anyone you think may be interested. And as always, feel free to leave a comment or story.
There is a book I read after my first marriage collapsed after 23 years, plus 5 years courting, 28 years of my life!
ReplyDeleteThe Five Love Languages
How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate by Gary Chapman
This book helped me understand that even though I had done what I thought was everything to show my love to my ex-husband, I might as well have been talking a foreign language! What he understood as showing love wasn't my understanding of showing love.
We all have a different concept of what love is and how it should be shown. This book helps you understand what your partner needs you to do for them, to show you love them. We tend to do for other as we would like done for us. We need to understand that what you want isn't always what they want.
Looking at what other do and trying to learn by it helps, helps a lot, every relationship works differently there is no exact blueprint, and this is what makes it all so difficult.
One of my favourite bits of wisdom! I passed on to my children is to listen to all the different pieces of advice yet get past on, pick out the bits that you like and feel relate to you, then mix them up and make them your own.
The same can be said about relationships, learn by the mistakes of others, but take a slightly different view/slant to fit in to your situation.
We all live in different hues of the same colour.