Why Does Everything Come With A Lesson?
Learning is essential to your life experience.
Everything you do, everything that just happens, every experience you have, anyone you meet, anywhere you go, will teach you a lesson. Some lessons don’t manifest immediately, others are instantaneous, and still others appear one way but turn out to be another.
Even the greatest minds to ever live, the smartest, wisest, and most educated on the planet today, and those who are yet to come can’t and don’t know everything. Nobody can know everything.
You are always learning, actively or passively. Many people choose not to be conscious of this and prefer to hold onto a specific set of data points and nothing else. That’s how you get bias, prejudice, stereotypes, racism, sexism, and outright hatred for the “other”, the unknown, and uncertainty.
Formal education is broken into two distinct parts. The first, earliest in your life, teaches you how to gather information and how to learn. Reading, writing, basic math, and listening skills are all taught to schoolchildren around the globe. This is the learning how to learn phase.
The second part, starting around middle school, is learning practical things about history, sciences, sociology, social studies, advanced math, and other similar specific notions and concepts. You start to use the first-part skills to genuinely learn specific, targeted things.
Unfortunately, you are never taught how to self-analyze. No formal education I’m familiar with ever goes into individual understanding of the self. Frankly, so much of it is groupthink and normalization of living to meet societal expectations, that it’s less surprising people fall for demagogues, false prophets, snake-oil salesmen, and lying faux-billionaires spewing bullshit than it should be.
Beyond formal education, however, you’re still learning, consciously or subconsciously. The lessons, however, aren’t always obvious.
Living on autopilot still involves learning
If you look at the messages of world leaders and the like, you should keep your head down, working for someone “better, smarter, and/or richer” than you, accepting you get only weekends off, and happiness in small doses at best. If you’re lucky, you can retire at 60. Sorry, 65. Nope, belay that, 70. Or should that be 75?
The ever-insistent “they” of society prefers you on autopilot. Get swept up not in the current of The Void or The Flow State, but instead in the rote, routine, and habitual. Take your place as a cog in the machine.
Living on autopilot as “they” prefer, you’re still learning. However, the lessons you learn are less obvious and more indirect. That’s because living by rote, routine, habit, and via autopilot are subconscious acts.
Everyone has three minds. Unconscious, subconscious, and conscious.
The unconscious mind is how your neurons fire to make your muscles do things, your heart beat, your lungs breathe, digestive system process food, and so on. You have zero control over this, save altering the depth of your breathing and slowing or speeding up your heart.
The subconscious mind is where your memories, values, beliefs, and habits live. You can access them at will, but that requires a conscious act. Similarly, you can act to change anything in your subconscious mind, but that’s where you get to the conscious mind.
The conscious mind is your inner mindset/headspace/psyche self, as you perceive it here and now. Via the conscious mind, you can access the subconscious to make changes, create new habits, review old memories, and so on.
Lessons learned while subconscious tend to have a delayed impact when something unintended activates your conscious mind. Unless YOU activate it.
Learning any lesson consciously
When you are actively consciously aware, working from your conscious mind, you’re in control. It’s you who chooses what to focus on, what you’re doing, and who, what, where, how, and why you are overall.
Pathwalking is all about being in the here and now, consciously aware, and using mindfulness to choose your life path. It involves breaking away from groupthink, societal expectations, and doing what “they” prefer you do.
That’s not to say that you must reject these ideas. They might, in fact, be perfect for you. The real issue isn’t rejecting norms as much as it is choosing them for yourself. Actively, consciously, with analysis and consideration.
You always have a choice. Allow yourself to be on autopilot and live subconsciously – or – take the wheel and drive/fly your life per your choices and decisions.
Because you’re human, you will shift between conscious and subconscious living. There are times when your mind needs to revert to rote, routine, and habit to process things like loss, sudden change, chaos, and uncertainty. The trouble with this is allowing it to be your normal, regular, unchecked way of being.
Realistically, practicing mindfulness and choosing to learn lessons consciously is how you’re empowered to be your most genuine, best, truest self. A large part of this involves accepting this truth: The one and only constant in the Universe is change. It can, will, and does occur no matter what you desire. Recognizing and acknowledging this is important to choosing the impact any given change will have on you.
You’ll note that I’ve yet to answer the question posed at the start of this article. Why does everything come with a lesson? Now you have the background necessary to take in the answer.
Why does everything come with a lesson?
If, as I postulate, the Meaning of Life is TO LIVE, then you must define what it means TO LIVE. This is conceptually simple: TO LIVE is to have experiences, do things, try things, make things, explore things, and seek out potential and possibilities to grow and expand. Or, in the simplest of terms, learn things.
Thus, everything comes with a lesson because that’s what life is all about. When all is said and done you grow, evolve, and learn throughout your life. Who you were and what you knew as a child, through various life experiences and lessons learned isn’t who you are or what you know today. Likewise, who you are and what you know today will be alien to who you will be and what you’ll know a decade from now.
Everything comes with a lesson, whether absorbed subconsciously or sought out consciously, because that’s life. New things are learned from experiences, reading, watching, doing, absorbing, and all sorts of similar concepts.
You live, you learn, and there are always lessons occurring. Some are small, subtle, and barely noticed. Others are ginormous, and deeply painful or incredibly enlightening. Everything you experience comes with a lesson.
Why? So that you can grow, evolve, change, and experience. This can be consciously chosen or subconsciously absorbed. The choice, however, is yours.
Formal schooling is never the end
Experiencing life is one big lesson. You’re here, in your body, to do just that. You’re here now, amid this amazing technology and a world with potential and possibilities for more people than ever before.
Unfortunately, many people believe learning stops when formal education does. You know all you need, and you only “learn” things utterly relevant to work, family, and the like. You’re done, someone else will guide you.
This false belief keeps people accepting that they have a specific lot in life. You have a singular destiny to accept, someone else will be your guide – a person, a business, a government, or even a God – and you must accept that.
If that’s true, explain to me any successful entrepreneur without a college degree? What about the person who was raised without privilege that becomes a success? How about anyone who chooses the arts? You’re not less than anyone who has chosen to break from the expected, the norm, and such.
That’s because you’re always learning, every day. The difference between those who achieve and those who simply exist is mindfully choosing conscious awareness over subconscious autopilot. One way to do that is to recognize that formal schooling isn’t the end of learning lessons by any stretch of the imagination.
You’re forever capable of growth, evolution, and change. Everything comes with a lesson to show you this (or, not to put too fine a point on it, teach you this). You can embrace this truth and seek learning or reject it and let the autopilot drive your life. Here and now, you can choose.
What lesson do you desire to learn today?
This is the six-hundred and fortieth (640) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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