We learn lessons as we mature, but it’s usually too late by then

By David McElroy · June 13, 2021

I’m not the same person I was when I was 25. I’m not even the same as I was 15 years ago. And I’m thankful for that.

Every now and then, I meet people who I knew years ago — in college or high school — and I can tell they haven’t changed inside. They’ve coasted through the years getting older — but not getting any wiser, as far as I can tell.

If you’re going to become wiser, it’s typically because you’ve done a lot of work on yourself. For me, therapy with a good psychologist was a catalyst for change. Before that, I’d gone through half a dozen bad therapists, which taught me to appreciate the good one I found. (My experience is that most of them get into it because they’re trying to fix themselves. And that wasn’t helpful for me.)

I’ve realized recently, though, that we rarely seem to learn the lessons we need to learn in time to stop us from stumbling into heartbreak. It seems that only by screwing up in big ways — which we’ll later regret — do we have those epiphanies which give us insight.

I was thinking Sunday afternoon about all the lessons I’ve learned from past relationships — and I realize that I didn’t learn those lessons in time to save myself from heartbreak each time.

We rarely seem to figure out the really important lessons about ourselves and what we need to change until we’re in the middle of a crisis. A broken relationship of mine from nearly 15 years ago is a great example.

A serious romantic relationship had just ended. I had made decisions about that relationship which I quickly came to regret (and which confused me). When I went into my most serious round of therapy, it was because of that relationship. I needed to understand what I had done — and why I had done it.

At the time, the most important thing to me was trying to fix the relationship. The pain of what I’d put myself through — and the eagerness to fix things with the woman — were my incentives to get into therapy. I had never consciously thought until today that I probably wouldn’t have ever had the incentive to work on myself if I hadn’t been trying to recover that lost love.

(I failed at fixing that relationship. It was too late. The paradox is that I don’t regret losing her all these years later. She had a lot of growth yet to go through — and I doubt either of us would have grown so much if things hadn’t happened as they did.)

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that times of crisis have always served as the catalyst for the most important changes I’ve gone through. In fact, I’m not sure we ever get serious about figuring out what’s wrong — and how to grow from that — unless we’re in pain and need help.

Unfortunately, this also means it’s usually too late to fix the situation we’ve messed up when we finally realize what’s wrong.

In every case I can think of when I’ve had major personal growth because of a crisis, I’ve been unable to fix whatever had started the crisis. Does this mean I’d be better off not to throw myself into crisis mode and figure out what I need to learn each time?

Of course not.

I’ve made mistakes — sometimes serious ones — in all of the crises that have happened in my life. But the nice thing is that I’ve learned from each crisis — and I haven’t made the same mistake next time.

You can either spend the time and energy to grow — and developing insight about your fellow humans — or you can remain the same person you were as a young adult.

If you simply say, “Well, this is just the way I am,” and refuse to address whatever you need to learn, you’ll keep making the same mistakes over and over. Or you will make one big mistake and live out that mistake every day — for the rest of your life.

Life is richer when you gain insight and you force yourself to grow. You’ll never be perfect, but you’ll do a better job the next time you put yourself into a potential crisis.

Maybe best of all, you’ll be able to love others more fully. You’ll also be able to let yourself be loved in richer ways. And you’ll make it more likely that your future relationships are free of the pain you’ve already put yourself through.

And who knows? There might come a day when you can fix your mistakes before it’s really too late.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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