Wisdom and experience on a Friday

A few years ago, on a Friday as it happened, 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 myself that the knife I was using was particularly 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 an eighth inch deep into the pointing finger of my left hand.

It hurt and it bled. Luckily I was five feet away from our upstairs bathroom. I jumped into it to the sink and held 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. Carefully, and basically with just one hand.

A few minutes later I was explaining to my daughter the lesson I'd learned: cut away from yourself. I added, trying to be whimsical while waxing philosophic, "Experience is when you learn from your mistakes. Wisdom is when you learn from the mistakes of others."

My darling daughter only smiled sweetly and said, "You just learned from experience. I just learned from wisdom."

Well, what could I say?