Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Experience and wisdom

So, last Friday I was replacing a light fixture in our upstairs hallway. Easy peasy, right? Only the ends of the electrical wires feeding into the fixture were badly frayed. So I thought I ought to peel them back a bit.
All went well until I was trying to shave off about a half-inch of insulation from each side of the power cord. I had just thought silently to tell myself that the knife I was using was sharp and that I should be careful. But Hell, I'll be done in a second, right?
I was done in a second. Done enough for my knife to slip and cut every bit of a quarter inch deep into the pointing finger of my left hand.
It hurt and it bled. Luckily I was five feet away from the basin in our upstairs bathroom. I jumped into it and ran my bleeding finger, bleeding like a stuck hog as the saying goes, under hot water for several minutes. Then I applied pressure, fixed gauze and white tape, and stopped the blood flow. I then finished the job.
A few minutes later I was explaining to my daughter the lesson I'd learned: cut away from yourself. I added, "Experience is when you learn from your mistakes. Wisdom is when you learn from the mistakes of others."
My darling daughter only smiled and said, "You just learned from experience. I just learned from wisdom."
Well, what could I say?




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