Experience ≠ Baggage

In my last post I talked about getting rid of old baggage. I would like clarify one thing, experience does not equal baggage. The old saying is to forgive and forget but who really forgets? Plus some experiences should be used as learning tools.

True story: The first time I ever tried to smother pork chops I forgot to drain the grease before I poured the water in the skillet. So the stove basically caught on fire. I turned off the stove, walked out of the kitchen, and prayed the fire would go out. Thankfully Jesus answers prayer and when I returned a couple of seconds later the fire was gone. Yes, I literally almost burnt down the house and yes, I walked away from the kitchen. Silly (or insert your own word), I know. But the point is I learned from that experience.

Experience vs. baggage

Because that experience was so traumatic I was afraid to cook smothered pork chops for a long time. That is what I call baggage; an experience you carry with you that prevents you from moving forward.

However, I am very intrigued by the whole smothering process. I mean you lightly fry pork chops, drain grease, onions and water, cover, and let simmer for a while and then you get these tender pork chops that are lightly smothered with gravy. I’m honestly fascinated by the whole thing.  So eventually I tried again! Seeing as though I almost caught the house on fire once, I will never forget to drain the grease. That is an experience; something you learn from and move forward.

Alright, I know most of you could care less about my pork chop incident so we’ll use something more relevant (since this is my blog I’ll put myself out there).

I have a knack for ending up in undefined relationships. I go into every situation saying, “Ok, I usually live in the gray area but I don’t want to do that anymore so at some point we are going to have to define exactly what we’re doing”.  When I state this a lot of men will automatically think, “Oh goodness, here we go with the baggage!” But it’s not baggage. I have experience with undefined relationships. I know how they end and I don’t like it. So it’s perfectly fine for me to say I’ve done this before and this is not what I want. In the past I found myself repeating this ugly pattern because I, myself thought it was baggage as well. So I would say, “You know, you’re right this may end differently”. Not so much! Baggage would be me just throwing in the towel and shunning every guy who tried to talk to me.That’s not the case.

It was however an experience I had to (currently) learn from. If my experience tell me I’m not going to like how this end why would I keep doing it? We all know the famous quote, “if you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.”

Some experiences shouldn’t be repeated. And that’s ok. That’s actually better than ok, that’s just having common sense. If you have an experience that you don’t happen to like you can remember where it went wrong and in the future (please note future means you are moving forward) you can do something different. Actually it’s your responsibility to do something different.