Things My Dad Would Say

It’s Father’s day, and for some reason my mind started chewing on stuff he used to say when he was mad.

"What were you thinking?"  (Seriously I never thought of the outcome—I just did stupid stuff.)

"Do you enjoy being grounded?"  (What answer did he expect?)

"Do you think I’m stupid?"  (Um...I was doomed no matter what I answered in this case, so I just blinked rapidly and looked like the stupid one.)

Then there were times he seemed to understand that his teenage girl really thought what she did was a good idea at the time.

This is when he’d say, "I’ll chalk this up to the ol’ learning process. So, learn dammit!"

I’d just nod.  (In my teenage mind, it didn't matter what the learning process was. All that mattered was that I evaded punishment.)

So...back to that learning process thing. I have a few questions for you.

This process means we should learn from said experience and do things differently next time, right? Well, if you really don’t know how things were going to turn out in the first place, trying something different the next go around might not be much better. So where exactly does the learning process fall into place?

How do we take something positive away from something negative?

Can something that turned out positive be a learning process?

 Are making mistakes a good thing? If so—why?

  So many questions to ponder, and I’d love to know what you think

Dad and me...before I gave him reason to ground me.

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