Making Messes...Not Just For Kids Anymore.

So I woke up at like 8:30 this morning with no alarm clock and no reason to be up that early. It is times like this that makes me feel like a grown up. Until...I had to make coffee.
Since starting the new job I have become kinda addicted to the stuff. I have like 2 cups at work. So this morning I wanted to use my stepdads coffee maker (yay for living at home!) and make me some here. Well..
First of all. Our coffee maker at work doesn't require us to put water inside the coffee thingy jig (my terminology gives you hope for the rest of this story yes?). All I have to do is put the giant filter in the other thingy jig put the coffee in the filter and put the coffee thingy jig under the first thingy jig. Makes sense? Follow closely. Well. This morning about 2 minutes into my "feeling grown up" coffee making I realize...where is the water going to come from. Yes folks I didn't know until "googling" (thank god it's not 1994 for I would be SCREWED) that water had to go in the back of the coffee maker. So I hurried and turned the coffee maker off and added water. WELL. Now I have coffee spurting out of the spurty thing and its getting everywhere but the coffee pot. So after I fixed that all seems to be better. But now after pouring my coffee, I have a mess to clean up. The kitchen looks like I let my 4 year old nephew have a field day with the coffee maker. While cleaning it up I kept asking myself "why do you always have to learn the hard way?" And that started me questioning myself in more deeper subjects than coffee making. So while my inner bully kept ragging on me all of a sudden this voice rang out (I like to call it my inner Bronx lady) and said "HEY! Sometimes that's a good thing! What did people do before Google and Owners Manuals huh?! Yeah they learned you big jerk! And where do YOU get off telling us that we're stupid? You're in this too bully! And learning things the hard way makes it so we don't make the same mistakes AND we have entertaining stories to tell at the next soiree. So stop raining on our parade pal and maybe instead of dirtying all the dish rags cleaning up coffee grounds USE A PAPER TOWEL YA PUTZ!" My Inner Bronx Lady can throw down. And I only used 2 dish rags before making the more sensible decision to use paper towels. My mom might not be too thrilled but oh well.
So in the end does it really matter how we learned something? Or at the end of our roads and ready to leave this world, does it only matter that we learned it? OR, at the end of the line is it the journey of how we got there? I believe it's the journey. I may learn the hard way sometimes, but I'm going to look back one day and have some awesome stories. Some that will make me laugh, some that will make me cringe. But as Miley Cyrus sang "It's not about how fast I get there, it's not about what waiting on the other side, it's The Climb." Now that's some deep coffee.