THE HARDEST LESSON IN LIFE TO LEARN

THE HARDEST LESSON IN LIFE TO LEARN
By
Bill Cottringer

“It isn’t what you think you know that is most important, but rather how you feel about what you think you know.” ~Unknown author.

What is this hardest lesson for us all to learn in life? Learning what to take seriously and what to not take seriously—mainly ourselves and all we think we know to be so. Take the institution of religion for an example. It is no wonder that so many churches are dying on the vine. People are waking up to the reality that we all have to find our own way back to the underlying mental and spiritual well-being we were born with; this is what institutions like religion took away, although with the best of intentions. This is because they took themselves a little too seriously, claiming to be the only way towards what was right, good and necessary.

The only thing we should take seriously is our own journey back to realizing the importance of and practicing the basic virtues that allow us to be fully human:

Love, hope, compassion, patience, tolerance, inclusion, caring and creativity.

These are the only things that can remove the unnecessary layer of emotional suffering that keeps us from being who we were born to be and helping our brothers and sisters shed that layer and be happier and more whole too as a family of humanity.

But there is a huge obstacle in the way of seeing this fundamental solution—our insensitivity towards catching the point of no return before it comes and goes in both moments of opportunity and moments of danger. And the reason for that is we have lost the point of what our human feelings are all about, and shifted our attention too far towards the thoughts we are convinced are creating the negative events and feelings that plague us. This is what we think we know that isn’t really so. How you feel about this is the entry point portal through the maze of dilemmas that hide the prize we are all searching for.

We don’t have to over-analyze the purpose of negative emotions like worry, fear, anxiety, greed, insecurity, hatred or the like. We just need to experience them for what they are—kind and gentle reminders for us to slow down and question our approach to understanding the true purpose of a negative event and the negative feelings that follow. Then we become more open to accepting the required amount of provocation to learn the lesson of how to deal with these unwanted, unpleasant realities that are confronting us, in a more positive, productive, and healthy way. The painful broken bones, bleeding and bruising only start occurring when we disregard the whispers that have become screams.

The newspaper headlines today tell us what we need to be taking seriously:

• Widespread suffering from a failed economy based on our own ignorance, immorality, greed and over-love of money.

• Distress from relationship conflicts at work and home and gross miscommunication making them worse.

• Addiction to immediate need gratification of finding quick and easy cures to problems.

• Information overload, hyper speed of change and the ever-widening survival gap to keep up.

• Perpetual and unsolvable wars we don’t know how to get out of without unwanted consequences.

• Growing generational disconnects and violence with youth we don’t even see yet.

These dreadful negative events aren’t bent on “punishing” us for our “sins.” But rather, they are trying to tell us that there is something basically wrong with our approach to understanding these things and that we may need to learn the lesson of dealing with them in a more human way with the main gifts that make us human—love, hope, compassion, patience, tolerance, inclusion, caring and creativity.

What we probably need more than anything else today is education for us each to make a major transformational attitude change that may actually be easier done than said. The needed shift is away from being in a desperate panic to attack problems with any means that seem to work in the short run, towards the careful thoughtfulness that leads to understanding our main purpose in life.

Slowing down to this basic point of no return, helps us learn how to be more successful in finding out how to carry out that purpose with our true positive human feelings, not the artificial, negative ones we allowed to take over our minds and hearts. It all starts with not taking yourself quite so seriously so you can better see the few things that really deserve our serious attention. Are you taking yourself too seriously or are you engaged in the serious business of using these positive feelings to make life better for yourself and others?