“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the constants of life is that there will be many lessons to be learned. And many opportunities to learn them. It has been said, that if you don’t learn a lesson the first time, it will bump into you over and over again until you master it.

I have learned to reframe my hardships into lessons. The original pain is short-term but the learning lives on to help me, long into the future.

I appreciate the Buddhist teaching that says, what we are attached to causes us the pain. When I let go of the attachment, I let go of the pain, and the lesson appears. What a wonderful trade off.

I am grateful to still be receiving lessons. They come in all forms. The messenger is sometimes a person, a situation, or something I have observed. Each lesson is precious.

We like to share our lessons with others – hoping they will receive the lesson without having to experience the pain. But I feel that I need to learn each lesson by myself. Then I will understand what someone was trying to teach me. It is a big “Aha!” moment.

As I age, I reflect upon the cliches and nuggets my parents and grandparents always shared. There is a lot of wisdom floating around us and I try to slow down and sit with it for a while.

As we move through our day, everything and everyone can be a mirror. We won’t always be received or perceived the way we want. We won’t always be understood or accepted. Woven in every interaction is a chance to see ourselves more clearly.

My biggest learning is to embrace the lessons and the opportunity for a new behavior with grace, gratitude, and without angry emotion.

I am still learning to let go. I am being taught to accept help and gifts as readily as I give them. I am practicing new boundaries. I can only change myself.

• What lessons are appearing in your life these days?

• What are the life-lessons that are so embedded in your being that they guide you all the time?

I am very much the person I have been all my life — with many values based on lessons as the foundation of my being. What is nice is I don’t need to abandon any of my core to make room for more learning, learning that rounds me out and gives me more ability to adapt to a very changing and challenging world.

The learning continues and the lessons rain down.

• What are you learning and doing with your self?

Leslie

“When we look deeply into the heart of a flower,
we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth,
and everything else in the cosmos in it.
Without clouds there could be no rain,
and without rain there would be no flower.”

— Nhat Hanh