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5 Valuable Life Lessons I Learned from The Dutch
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” — Benjamin Franklin
I was that child who grew up with an atlas. My atlas was the key to my happiness, my gateway to faraway lands, for I loved to travel. As a child, I didn’t really get a lot of opportunities to travel, but that didn’t stop me from dreaming about these faraway, exotic places.
I would spend hours immersed in books and my atlas (that was the era before smartphones and the internet!) reading about a place, its culture, history, and even about all the ancient civilizations.
When I read about the Mayan civilization, I had a great desire to see Merida and Ixtapa in Mexico. I would jot down notes in my journal, and make extensive plans about visiting all these places someday.
Thankfully, I did get the opportunity to see the world and even live a life of an expat on three different continents and four different countries. My childhood dream did come true.
But the best part is something that I didn’t even expect — I learned some extremely valuable life lessons, values, and skills from my life abroad that changed me and shaped me into who I am today. It’s been an incredible journey, one that I’ll be forever grateful for.
I was aware of these values, but as they say — “only in water can you learn to swim”. I have called the Netherlands my home for the last 6 years, and here are five very important life lessons that I learned from the Dutch.
Resilience
“Resilience is defined as the psychological capacity to adapt to stressful circumstances and to bounce back from adverse events.”
The Dutch are well known for their resilience, and it’s kind of easy to understand why. One-third of the Netherlands lies below sea level. Since the early Middle Ages, the Dutch have been building dams and dikes to protect against flooding and kept reclaiming land from the sea. That’s no mean feat.
Even with the constraint of this vulnerable low-lying land, the Netherlands is the 17th largest economy in the world — thanks to resilience, an essential life skill.
