The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1920-06-26
Dorothy Dix Talks
BY DOROTHY DIX
Worlds Highest Paid Woman Writer.
What Has Life Taught Your.

What Has Life Taught Your.
There is an old saying to the eff
feet that experience is a hard school
but fools will learn in no other.
Alas and alack, most OF us are such
dolts, that we do not even profit by
experience. In vain does life try to
teach US wisdom. We refuse to learn
our lesson even tho it is beaten into
us with blows and cudgeling and tears.
In all the vagaries of human nature
there is nothing stranger than this,
that we so seldom let the past be a
light of warning to our feet. We go
on stumbling into the same old pit
falls, and making the same blunders,
and repeating the same mistakes year
after year, tho for every one we have
had to pay with bitter suffering. and
unavailing regrets.
IT have made many mistakes in my
life" said a successful man to me
once. "but they have been fresh mis-
takes, every time. have never made
the same mistake the second time"
Which is. perhaps, the difference
between the wise man and the fool.
He learned, from experience. Most
people don't.
And it isn't because we have forgot
ten the agony we have gone thru or
that we fail to see the red flag of
danger that experience flaunts before
our eyes. It's because we are the vic
tins of a sort of fatal optimism that
persuades US that this time some sort
of a miracle will be wrought in our
behalf that will preserve US from the
logical outcome of our folly.
On forty occasions before we may
have had painful proof of what our
outraged stomach thought of a COM
bination of cucumbers. and ice cream,
and watermelon, but that doesn't keep
US from blithe1y feasting on the dead
| ly mixture, and being surprised when
we have to call in the doctor later on.
A man will break himself down by
overwork but instead of letting his ex-
perience teach him to conserve his
strength and his health, the minute he
gets out of the sanitarium, he plunges
right back into the vortex of business
and wrecks himself again.
A woman will buy something at a
bargain sale that she doesn't want and
for which she has no earthly use be-
! cause it has been marked down from
$3.50 to S1.47, and then she will Won
der why she did it and bemoan her
wasted money. But a hundred such
experiences never teaches her to walk
by a special sale of flummery without
even turning to look back. She always
does the Lots wife act. no matter how
many times before she has been sailed.
And why are most households a
dark and bloody domestic battlefield
with husband and wife in never end
ing scrimmage, except that people
simply refuse to learn anything from
experience.
During the first couple of years
after a young couple get married there
is some excuse for there being little
conflicts between them. and for the
domestic machinery to creak and
groan from time to time.
You can not take any two people,
especially male and a female person
who come of different blood, who
| have had a different training and en-
vironment and look at every subject,
from politics to pie, from a different
angle, and expect them to merge into
a harmonious whole at once. They
have got to get acquainted with each
other and find out what each one
thinks; they've got to get the real life
measure. not the counting measure. of
each other; they have got to find out
each others little peculiarities and
weaknesses and prejudices and big
ness and littleness.
| Copyright. 1920, by the Wheeler Syndicate,
Incl