Another bit of common UN-wisdom is the urging “Don’t cry over spilt milk”. But let me ask, why not? While the statement can be interpreted (and was likely originally intended) to mean “Don’t focus on past failures and let them stop you from moving forward, clean up the mess and move on” in the modern world it has come to be understood (and frequently used) to say “Don’t worry about what happened previously, you can’t do anything about it any way” which encourages people to feel powerless and just accept whatever happens. In that approach there is no “take responsibility for your mistakes, fix your own darn problems, clean up your own stinkin’ mess, and get on with making something worthwhile out of your life!” Instead it encourages a victim-mentality in people to just ignore their mistakes, avoid dealing with their errors, and bow their head to take whatever junk gets dished out to them. Don’t fight, don’t resist, don’t demand better (from yourself or others), just forget what happened yesterday, sweep the failures under the rug, and pretend they don’t matter. In short, it makes people wimps to a greater extent than if they *did* cry over the spilt milk, then cleaned it up and moved on.
One of the reasons there is suffering in the world is that people seem to *only* be able to learn something through suffering. While the suffering can be either their own or someone elses, it seems that always somewhere in the lesson someone suffered. How many of us as children, even after being told that the stove was hot and it would burn us *insisted* on finding out for ourselves exactly what truth there was in that lesson we were told? Perhaps it wasn’t a burner, maybe it was an electric socket or a sharp knife or something else…but we have all insisted on experiencing suffering ourselves to verify a lesson we were told. Of course if we were there when our friend/sibling suffered we learned the lesson as well. We insist on constantly “proving” the lessons each generation…and when we’re in our teenage years we still play the same “prove it” game..and suffer to verify what our parents told us..and when we’re in our 30’s we still play the game in our careers, doing things we know will cause problems because we think we can “get away with it” only to end up suffering for it…and in our 50’s…same game (prove it to me), same rules (it’ll hurt), same results (it hurts). Humanity seems to insist on suffering as a method of learning lessons, and as long as we ignore our failures we cannot learn from them, as long as we ignore our mistakes things just get worse (ignore your weight problem, toothache, or broken leg and see where it gets you) In order for us to learn from our suffering we have to admit it exists, accept it as the consequence for what we did, fix it, and not let it stop our growth. The process of accepting responsibility for our mistakes can be painful..and sometimes we may need to cry about it.
Perhaps we in the modern world need to modify/update this to say “Don’t just cry over spilt milk, do something about it”
Just a thought
-Xenophon