The Valuable Lessons Life Brings Throughout life, people are bound to make mistakes and go through hard times: it is inevitable. Although many people are blind to it, these setbacks in life often bring valuable lessons. Life lessons help people better themselves everyday. The most important life lessons that I’ve learned are about friendships, family, and being on a team. One valuable life lesson that I’ve learned is about friendships. I’ve learned that true friends will be loyal when their friends aren 't around. I grew up in a small neighborhood in Madison, Mississippi. For as long as I can remember, I had three best friends, Sarah, Kim, and Lillie. Sarah and Lillie were my neighbors, and Kim lived on the next street over. Sarah, Kim, Lillie and I, also known as “the four amigos,” grew up doing everything together: from learning how to swim and ride bikes to learning how to drive a car. We even stayed best friends throughout the awkward years of …show more content…
I’ve learned that family should come first in any and all situations. When I was 13 years old, my grandmother fell and hit her head causing internal bleeding on the brain. I received a call from my mom as I was on the way to the beach with some friends. She explained what had happened and that my grandmother was unconscious and about to head into surgery. My friend’s parents told me that they would turn around and take me back so I could be with my grandmother and family. However, not realizing how serious her condition was, I made the choice to go ahead and go to the beach with my friends as planned. I selfishly thought that she would be okay, and that I’d see her three days later when I got back. However, my grandmother didn’t live to see those three days. I still to this day regret not going and seeing my grandmother: it still haunts me from time to time. The mistake I made taught me that family is first no matter what and do not take that for
In the novel A Lesson Before Dying, Grant and Jefferson are black men in the era of a racist society; but they have struggles with a greater dilemma, obligation and commitment. They have obligations to their families and to the town they are part of. They lived in a town were everybody knew everybody else and took care of each other. "Living and teaching on a plantation, you got to know the occupants of every house, and you knew who was home and who was not.... I could look at the smoke rising from each chimney or I could look at the rusted tin roof of each house, and I could tell the lives that went on in each one of them." [pp. 37-38] Just by Grant’s words you can tell that that is a community that is very devoted to each other.
Life is short and it is up to you to make the most out of it. The most important lesson that everyone should follow and apply to everyday life is “never give up”. In the novel, “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines, the important lesson can be shown in the characters Jefferson, Miss Emma and Grant Wiggins.
The lady that appears after the first 100 pages of the book turns out to be Vivian, Grant’s secret lover. Grant and Vivian take a walk and after their walk they visit Grant’s aunt, aunt Emma. Aunt Emma and her friends are very fond of Vivian and they give her many compliments. Aunt Emma, and the reverend go to visit Jefferson and they find that Grant’s previous account of Jefferson’s recovery was lie; Jefferson still eats and behaves like a “hog';. Aunt Emma and the reverend confront Grant regarding his faulty account of Jefferson’s recovery. Once again, Grant visits Jefferson and tries to convince him that he is not a hog and he is a man. After a couple more visits from the ladies and Grant, the chapter ends off with the whole town watching a Christmas play on the birth of Jesus. After the play, Grant is tired of watching the same play and seeing the same people dressed in the same kinds of clothing year after year.
I thought that the book A Lesson Before Dying was all right overall. I think Ernest Gaines did a good job with the plot but the idea of the book was not to interesting to me. A book about a black man becoming a man on his way to the electric chair is a very dull plot to me. I give Gaines credit for making the book semi-interesting even though the plot was terrible. Personally after reading Things Fall Apart and Song of Solomon I was looking for a little more action in this book. Those two books were ten times better than A Lesson Before Dying so I can say that I was probably expecting too much.
A dynamic character is one who grows and changes during the corse of a novel. Jefferson, in Ernest Gaines’ novel A Lesson Before Dying, is an example of a dynamic character. Throughout the novel, Jefferson grows and matures from a life where he considers himself a hog to a life where he realizes he can defy what is expected from him.
The most supportive of friends are manifest during life’s toughest of obstacles. They are the ones that help us power through the storm. Karen Karbo claims, “Most of us would prefer to think that we love our friends because of who they are, not because of the ways in which they support who we are. It sounds vaguely narcissistic, and yet the studies bear it out.”(156) while Yvette and I stated off as simple associates, she was soon to be reviled as my most supportive friend. She was just another co-worker. However, after our bosses went through a divorce, our most dependable co-worker moved, and another reunited with her drug habit, Yvette was the only one I could depend on. Together we became an unbreakable team. We could run the front office without any flaws. Since our friendship was growing we became even more supportive of each other, if one was slacking the other would step up and make sure the task was completed. We would switch off on answering the phones and taking on a challenging customer. Occasionally we would go out for a drink to destress from work. We had just started taking our girls out on play dates, and hanging out on weekends. One night my mom called me to let me know she had made other plans for the following night and I needed to figure out another arrangement for my daughter. Most nights I depend on my mom to watch my daughter so I can go to class, and when she is unable my sister will step in. In
The lessons are numerous and range from trivial to profound, but there’s one that's had the most impact on my life. Fortunately, I was born into a unconditionally loving family with good health and parents that I feel comfortable talking to under almost any circumstance. Until I got to really know my friends, I was aware that not everybody’s lives were like this but never really understood what a life without those privileges was like. But then my perspective changed when I found out that a couple of my friends have terrible relationships with their parents and suffer from depression and anxiety. Another one of my friends suffers from chronic migraines and has been hospitalized three times in the past year. All of my friends are incredible individuals, and knowing in detail of what they withstand on a daily basis has made me more empathetic to the people around me. I think we all forget sometimes that other people are people, we subconsciously go into this state of mind thinking we’re the center of the whole world. But in actuality, that is not the case; everyone else has their own unique lives and issues they’re dealing with. So what I’ve learned by knowing of my friends’ distinctive stories is just to be more cognizant of others. It's difficult to have that state of mind all the time, but in doing so I have better relationships with
Life lessons are good for people. They can help you more than they can hurt you. They really don’t hurt you, because they are like warnings for the bad stuff out in the world today. They are just little helpful hints. They are especially helpful when you are in the time of need. If a life’s lesson hurts you, you are using them in the wrong way.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned is to never give up and that everything in life happens for a reason. Throughout my entire life my dreams have been put down by society, wether it was a coach, friend, or family member. Everything I gain is because of me and only me. When I started my first year of high school, I knew I wasn't ready to maintain my academics, my social life, and my sports schedule all at once. I was completely intimidated by everything occurring in my life at the time.
During my life, I have learned many things that I’m either expected to do or know. My family and friends have impacted my life in multiple ways that have shaped me as a person over time. These values that my family has taught me has made me the person I am today and most likely the person I will be for the rest of my life.
Everyone, at some point in their life, has made a mistake. Sometimes we get lucky and only falter a little, making it through the problem relatively intact. Other times, we mess up a lot and have to fix what was damaged over a long period of time. However, the same is true for most, if not all cases—those who make the mistake learn from it. Often times, our failures teach us valuable lessons that we only gained because of the experience we gathered after messing up. I have personally achieved a wealth of knowledge and experience just from all of my own little mishaps, and a few major ones.
Like Cole, I too have learned a few lessons in the short thirteen years I’ve lived on Earth. One of the most important things I have ever learned is one of the most important relationships to have is friendship. A lot of times I’ve thought I can do everything by myself and never let anyone else in, and often than not I’ve ended up hurting myself worse. I’ve learned being surrounded by people who care about you and believe in you is one of the most important assets to being a happy pe...
Failures can be used as lessons so that the failure will not be repeated again. There could be long term failures that are crucial to life to remember and there could be short term failures that help a bit. One of my greatest failures in life that I've experienced and learned from would be from the time of my first grade year. I didn’t take school serious when I was in the first grade and made terrible grades. After this failure, it made change the outlook on school and I started trying. I learned that I need to take school serious or else I will do bad in school. This failure lead to success in school and it has changed the way I think of
Why do you need to learn from your mistakes? The most important life lessons we will ever learn will be from the bad decisions we make. Time and experience can be excellent teachers w...
There are numerous lessons that I have learned from life, they were lessons that I learned from good and bad experiences in life. Different experiences from school and out of school that has made me the way I am today. There is a long list of experiences that in reality did not teach me much.