What Experience Teaches, and What it Doesn't

This morning, I called into Covered California (the Golden State’s agency for implementing Obamacare). I needed to buy a new health insurance policy for 2024 – and needed to buy one as a single person once again. Victoria and I are divorcing, and though we are on the same health plan for the remainder of the year, we will be on our own come January 1.

I like to make small talk with people on the phone. Some would say I overshare.  As I explained the necessary changes to my policy, I made a joke to Gina – the Covered California agent – that this was my fifth divorce.  She gave a slight squeal. “I’ve been married five times too,” she said, “I just got married again in June. I think this is the one. Five and done!”

Gina told me she’d never “met” anyone (even on the telephone) married more than four times. I confessed I hadn’t known many myself. We joked about ten marriages between us.  “Imagine the total cost of all those weddings! It’s the GDP of a small country!” 

Gina found me a good, cheap health plan. Before we ended the call, she asked the obvious question: “Are you going for number six, Hugo?”

“I think probably not. I hope I’ve learned my lesson.”

Gina laughed. “That’s the thing about us, though. Do we ever really learn?  I don’t know about you, Hugo, but experience isn’t always the best teacher!”

I conceded it so, and we wished each other well, and with one final chuckle brought on by that conspiratorial “us,” we said goodbye.

My daughter is nearly 15. My son is 11, and puberty is descending. They are starting to figure things out about their family history, starting to ask questions they couldn’t think to ask before.  And they are making observations.  Heloise pointed out last week that both her mother and I are ambitious, hard-working, and resilient.  My first-born, who is learning to write essays in freshman English, did a little compare-and-contrast:  “You and mom have both been through a lot. The difference is that mom persevered through things that happened to her, while you persevered through your own mistakes.”

My kids’ mom grew up in poverty, raised by a single, functionally illiterate, immigrant mother. Eira was the first in her family to go to college, and the first to have a baby only after getting married. To put it glibly, my ex-wife is a breaker of cycles. I am a breaker of rules.  I have gone hungry and been homeless and gone to jail, and those things have happened to me because of choices I made. Eira has visited every male member of her family in jail, and she often went hungry as a child.  Similar pain – and yet not similar at all. 

I explained to my daughter that adversity is a wonderful teacher, but not everyone who experiences adversity learns the lesson.  Some people repeat eighth grade until they flunk out; some people get married five times; some people can’t get sober.  Others go through one divorce, fail one class, get caught shoplifting one time – and the memory of the shame and the pain is sufficient to inoculate them against ever screwing up again.  Some people, like my kids’ mother, learn by witnessing the mistakes of others, and vow to never imitate them.  Some of us lose nearly everything to break a cycle.

The question is, did we “have to” lose nearly everything?  Am I the decent father and the capable ghostwriter and the gentle friend and loyal cousin that I am only as a consequence of all that bitter experience? Did I need to drink that much, sleep with that many, break that many rules, give that many embarrassing interviews, tell that many secrets, persist in so many lies, dodge so many conflicts, all in order that I might become the halfway acceptable human being I am now?  Must we automatically attribute to tenacity what is better explained by stupidity?

In law school and logic class, they warn against the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc: “After this, therefore because of this.” It’s a fallacy repeated in tiresome therapeutic bromides.  “You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince.” “You have to fall down many times in order to learn how to get back up.”  “You’re only so kind and empathetic because of all the hell you went through.”  We are people who like stories, and we are attracted to the familiar myths, and so we believe that wisdom and depth and virtue are the consequence of suffering overcome. 

The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy infuses a lot of our discussion of everyone’s favorite diagnosis, trauma. “Too much suffering makes a stone of the heart,” wrote Yeats, and some of us choose to believe that suffering leads to lasting and incapacitating trauma.  “My pain has been too great; I cannot possibly be expected to cope.”  A lot of us say that in a lot of ways, pointing to our histories of abuse and misfortune and – in my case – a violent concussion.  I do have a traumatic brain injury, but does that even explain, much less excuse, my spectacular litany of shortcomings?

I don’t have the answer to these questions. What I do know is, as Gina the insurance agent hinted, whatever modicum of happiness some of us enjoy is at least as much in spite of our choices as because of them.  There is something wonderful and winsome about our willingness to wed again and again – and something exasperating and sad about the way that we cannot seem to ever do what is needed to make those marriages work.

What I can say to my children is this: adversity will come. You do not need to seek it out. Just as you do not have to climb a high mountain by yourself to speak to God, you do not have to seek out pain in order to learn what pain will teach.  If you can cultivate good habits and empathy, if you listen and observe, you will learn many things without having to experience them for yourselves.  You do not need to try heroin to know it is dangerous. You do not need to take dozens of people to bed to be able to evaluate romantic compatibility. You do not need to try every last church, shul, mosque, and ashram in town in order to find the best pathway to God.  We are a people of story, my children, but you can learn from the stories of others as well as you can from bitter experience.

I hope my children are as lucky as I have been. I hope too that they do not need quite as much luck as I have needed. I hope that they can learn just a little sooner than I did, without quite as many heartbreaks and public embarrassments. 

I work very hard not to regret my past. I deny myself regret because I know regret opens a doorway to shame, and shame leads to despair, and despair robs me and everyone around me of the man I need to be now.  I am who I am, I suppose, in spite of and because of my experiences and choices. Perhaps I am still here because of something greater than myself that saved me for a purpose, bought me at a price, and has work for me yet to do.  Was it necessary that I live as I lived for me to do that work? Maybe. Maybe not. What matters is that I do it. What matters is that we all keep doing it.

Please join me in wishing nothing but the best for Gina in Yucaipa.