What's Your Takeaway?

Two thoughts have proven to me to be very helpful in the conduct of my daily life.  The first is, ‘Every experience carries its lesson.’  The second is, ‘What is my takeaway from this experience’? 

The first thought is an assumption that challenges me to look for life lessons in even the mundane day-to-day activities that we all experience.  It helps me to be a more careful observer, to pay attention to what I do and what others do in my presence. It helps me to be attentive to my environment.  It helps me to not lose my keys. 

 

As I read, it causes me to look for the message that was significant enough for the writer to include it in his/her text.  It may be a clue to a mystery—literary, scientific, or social—or it may be an answer or partial answer to some issue or concern of my life.  It may be something that I should draw to another person’s attention—who just left her keys/purse/glasses on the bench they were just occupying.  The experience may be something I needed to make me a more well-rounded person or the other person to whom I am attentive slightly more careful or focused on the things at hand. 

    

The second thought, ‘What is my takeaway from this experience?’ suggests the thing I should remember, or what evaluation I should make of what I just experienced.  It gives me an opportunity to weigh the experience in terms of what I already know, or what I should know, or how this experience validates or adds to or challenges previous assumptions or assertions.  I should store the takeaway in my mental bank to help me or others in the pale of my influence in the future. 

 

In short, the experience drives the takeaway.  And the takeaway should change us to a greater or lesser degree.  We should try to learn from every experience—positive or negative, immediate or vicarious.  And then we should be grateful to our God for allowing us to see and discriminate the good from the bad, the sweet and the bitter, the light and the darkness, the right and the wrong, 

In moral matters, it encourages us to ‘choose the right’ and not just ‘go with the flow.’ 

What is your ‘takeaway’ from having just experienced reading this little essay—this advice from the ‘old school?’