Freedom and poor choices

My life has been a strange, ever surprising journey where I have challenged and taken for granted every value and idea that has mattered to me only to develop a far deeper and more genuine appreciation for universal and deeply significant values and ideas that up until this point in my life I have largely taken on faith.

The strangest part about my life has been that it has only been by learning and screwing up so many important decisions that I have internalized lessons with the empirical reality of life experience that faith and abstraction never could have offered me.

Like everyone, I hate the consequences of poor choices. But, strangely, those consequences taught me lessons that no abstraction ever could have come close to offering.

Maslow's right. Freedom is the path to self-actualization, because even the bad choices offer learning that good choices and good lessons, alone, could never offer.

And now my life experience replaces that faith as the basis for my confidence in that conclusion, that fact and that central value of a better life.

Love,
Ben