Take Time To Learn The Lesson

Yesterday my son decided to sneak his tablet to school even though I had previously told him not to.  Well, as fate would have it, someone got into his backpack and stole it.  There was no need to yell at him because he was already feeling bad about the situation.  I decided to make him tell me what he had learned from the experience.  He took full responsibility and did a pretty good job of telling me the things he had learned, so I left him alone, feeling satisfied that he had learned a painful lesson.

I felt bad for him, but realized his mistake was a youthful error in judgment.  As I sat there afterwards, I begin to realize that there was a lesson for me in this story.  All too often we make mistakes in life, but we refuse to take responsibility for our actions and often times, take the easy route of blaming others.  Other times we just shrug off our mistakes and move on, never considering what caused the mistake in the first place.  It is no shock that at the ripe age of almost forty-three, many of the circumstances I face today are a direct result of not taking responsibility for my actions, or not learning from previous mistakes.  Most of my successes in life are due to learning lessons from my mistakes.

My point is pretty simple today.  From now on, when you make a mistake, don't just carry on in life and think that everything will fix itself, but take a moment to stop, analyze the situation and trace back to the real cause of the problem, then take the appropriate measures to correct it.  You see an 11 year old kid realized that, while someone else committed a criminal act and stole from him, he was ultimately responsible for taking the tablet to school in the first place!  It is such a simple concept, that even kid with virtually no life experience has figured it out! 

Once you address the situation, you can move on in life and hopefully be better off as a result of learning from our mistakes.  I'm sure my son still feels a little bit bad about not having his tablet, but he definitely learned his lesson.  Now, he can move on in life and see if he can figure out how to get a new tablet if his old one is not recovered from the kid who took it....