Crying over spilt milk can be helpful

DURING a stroll in my housing complex, I overheard an elderly man tutoring a boy, probably his grandson. The boy was on the verge of tears, and the man tried to console him. “Yes! You should cry over spilt milk! Only then can you learn from your mistakes.” The reference to spilt milk took me back a few decades.

A few days after I landed in Tulsa, Oklahoma (US) with my family, I realised that it was a must to learn driving because of the poor connectivity of the local public transport. It was a challenge for me as I had no experience of driving in India.

The first and foremost step was that I had to get a learner’s licence. For this, I had to pass an online exam, but that was fairly simple. Next was the actual driving test. I had to show them that I was aware of the traffic rules and could do a perfect parallel parking. My husband and a driving tutor guided me in this regard, and it took me quite some time to handle the vehicle. Finally, when I felt that everything was in place, I decided to give the test a shot.

On D-Day, I reached the venue well in time. An elderly woman was my evaluator, and she made me feel at home. She first asked me to demonstrate my parking skills. To my surprise, I did it perfectly. Probably, I became overconfident after completing the most difficult part of the test. Next, she asked me to drive to a junction where an orange light was blinking, which meant that I had to proceed with caution. At the crossroads, there was another vehicle ready to cross the junction to my left-hand side. As per rules, I had to give way to the vehicle that had arrived at the junction before me, but I sped on. My evaluator, who was sitting beside me, gave a gasp. When I finished the test, she chided me for the mistake at the crossroads. She asked me to take the test another time.

It upset me that I had ignored the basic first-come-first-served rule at the junction, though I had sailed through the difficult parts of the test. I analysed my mistake and figured out what had gone wrong. I was better prepared the next time. In my second attempt, though my parking wasn’t perfect, I did well overall and at last managed to get a licence! The life lesson I learnt was that one should give even the smallest and simplest tasks as much importance as the bigger and tougher ones.

All said and done, as Socrates put it, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Or to put it in other words, do cry over spilt milk.

Musings