Everyday Canvas

Shared Experiences

Prompt: What do you think 'shared experiences' do? Do they bring people together or do they do just the opposite? Or whatever their influences can be, are they forgotten eventually?

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I think a shared experience may bring people together or it may split them apart, depending on the nature and duration of the experience.

On the other hand, in contrast to a single experience, a collection of shared experiences can be more lasting in the memory, even if the initial experience may be the strongest or the weakest in intensity. Then, in time, any experience can be forgotten, but the memory of a shared experience will live longer as more and more people recall and relive it through their conversations, artwork, or writing.

On the negative side, sometimes, people do not like to be reminded of a distasteful, hurtful event and thus shun the company with whom they went through a certain undesirable experience; however, on the positive side, a shared experience or a chain of experiences validate the fact that more than the person alone is bearing witness to the existence of the person and the experienced events.

By their true nature, some specific events make us question and answer the concept of who we are and the worth of our existence. A birthday, a wedding, a graduation, a funeral, winning an award or a praise, being in a good place or enduring life in a rotten one, for example. A lack of company to witness such events can be unbearable at times, even for people who value their solitary moments. If this weren’t so, why would people take photos or write about their experiences to share on Facebook and elsewhere?

I tend to believe a lot of good comes from shared happy experiences in contrast to the hurtfulness of a distressing experience. Even in the latter case, having gone through something upsetting with others is more of a solace than having faced an undesirable situation alone.

Then again, being dependent on others for more meaning with our experiences makes us psychologically exposed, as our thoughts and feelings seem to be out of our personal control. Still, in such a case, the idea that the experience doesn’t belong to us alone ties us to a group, and in succession, to the entire world of humanity. After all, we humans are not separate lonely islands but a whole continent and even an entire planet.