Lessons learned

Humanity’s collective internalization of lessons learned is akin to a glacier—a gigantic heterogeneous mass of ice, snow, water, rock, and sediment—inching along month after month, week by week, and day by day, moving so slowly that its progress is virtually imperceptible. 

However, many of our individual lessons learned are far more akin to an avalanche—a torrent of snow tumbling down a mountainside at staggering volume and dizzying speeds.

When there were hundreds of millions of people who lost everything in all the horrific wars of the last century, why do we in the present day lay complacent? Why do we continue to perpetuate hate, intolerance, and violence in our world? Why are we so ambivalent about the nature of right and wrong, when for those that actually endured such tragedies, would not have an inkling of doubt? 

It seems as though many of those lessons are simply lost generation after generation, but it’s clear, when we look at the progress of human civilization at the macro level, it’s clear that they aren’t simply lost. It may be that the vast majority of lessons are indeed lost, and what few remain are those resilient enough to impart some degree of knowledge or imbue some form of wisdom into our collective consciousness, 

It is also another conundrum entirely if we question the value of collective progress; we already seldom ask ourselves what specifically needs progressing, let alone whether or not we need to progress in the first place. After all, to nature, it makes no difference; what are an avalanche and a glacier but water molecules shifting around from place to place? Everything that happens on Earth is a cycle, and all is one and the same.

If we go back to this paradoxical notion of suffering, perhaps that is the point of it all—to suffer, even if not collectively advancing humanity as a whole, even if we repeat the mistakes of the past, for it is all that gives us meaning in the end.