Life experience and backpacks....

Here's the way that I look at life experience, good and bad. For some reason, I often make mental images of things and the following is my mental image of life experience. We all have a backpack we carry for our life experiences. I like to imagine that as I experience something (whether positive or negative), I just fold that experience up and pack it in my backpack. Some people have very new-looking, rather empty backpacks. Those are the people who haven't had a whole lot of things happen to them. Sure, they probably haven't faced the really crappy things, or even just the crappy things that a lot of us have (or perhaps, still will), but they also haven't faced all the really cool things that we have either! And some people, heaven help them, have very worn, but fairly empty backpacks. And if you look really closely at theirs, there is a big hole in the bottom. These are the people who don't learn the lesson that the life experience could teach them. They're the ones who are doomed to make the same mistake over and over because they don't learn from and remember what they are supposed to. I like to think of my backpack as being worn, stuffed full, covered with tons of patches sewn all over it from all the cool "places" (literally and figuratively) I've been. And you'll never see me without my backpack because I bring all those experiences to everything I say and do and think and to how I relate to people. What would life be without taste or smell? Sure, there are bad tastes and bad smells, but if you kept from experiencing simply for fear of the bad, you'd miss all the good, too.

What does your backpack look like?