By Deborah Blackwell

No experience? Forget it.

In our country, to secure gainful employment, you pretty much need a college degree and a couple years of experience. For some jobs, it’s necessary. But when our governor recently filed an executive order removing a college degree requirement from state job applications to consider experience first, I was thrilled. I’m a college grad, but I know some brilliant, talented people who have been automatically disqualified from jobs because they didn’t have that pertinent piece of paper or the entry on the resume to prove it.

Think about it: What exactly does “experience” mean? Merriam Webster has five definitions, but this one is my favorite: “Something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through.”

This looks beyond a snapshot to the whole — someone’s innate wisdom, learned knowledge, talent, personality, and inherent hard-won skills — their experience.

Like a lot of people, I went to college unsure of what I wanted to do, and came out not wanting to do what I focused on. So, after dabbling in the field my degree dictated, I quit, put my degree on hold, and spent the next many years as a stay-at-home mom. I loved it and stuck with it (despite social/moral judgement) until the birdies were out of the nest.

Fast-forward from those naive, where-am-I-going-feel-my-way-through-hope-for-the-best early years when I was living life and life was living me. Those years where I was picked up, let down, joyful, miserable, hopeful, defeated, no matter what I was doing. Those years where both wisdom and experience were accumulating and became everything.

Last week, in the midst of a crappy experience, I concluded it was time to live my best life. I realized life is just an uncountable chain of experiences, one after another after another. Each comes with its own container—actions, reactions, emotions, thoughts, feelings, happenings—that occur, then spill over into whatever is next, experience after experience.

Experience is more than something you need to get a job. It’s even more than something that happens to you. Experience is actually something for you. It’s the guiding force that makes life, well, life. It’s such a simple concept, but it’s huge.

And here’s the best part.

I can choose to hold onto any part of any experience and let it propel me forward, or I can step back and look at it as one piece of a whole and give it the meaning and the feeling I choose. If I don’t like it, I can move on knowing it’s just one square on the quilt of my life. If I do like it, well, that square can be as big as I want it to be.

What is the best definition of experience? Oscar Wilde said, it’s a name we give our mistakes. But I like to think my experiences — good, bad, or otherwise — make me who I am. Not just expressed on a piece of paper in black and white, but more like a quilt, made up of many distinguishing, notable parts, colorful, unique, imperfect, beautiful.

Can you imagine a world where that is the fabric of life?

Experience … is everything.