Life's Hardest Lesson

LIFE”S HARDEST LESSON
By
Bill Cottringer.

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.” ~Rick Warren.

A doctor and her patient were having a defining-moment discussion about life’s hardest lesson. “So tell me what it is, said the impatient patient to the doctor? Patiently, the doctor answered the patient, it is patience.” Now being born a classic over-achiever plagued with severe ADHD without the availability of Ritalin, this lesson of patience has been eluding me for the better part of seven decades of living. But, the good news is I think I may have finally gotten a handle on it.

Why is patience so important and so difficult to exercise? It is because of what we are being impatient about getting—enough peace of mind to start decreasing the doubts that we have enough. Unfortunately, the most common experience is, ‘enough is never enough.’

We are all searching for one thing—enough peace of mind; but, this primary objective is really just three abstract words that represent a variety of many other, more real and practical things, that are very different in people’s minds and hearts. Consider this short list compiled by students in my earlier psychology class, which you can easily lengthen from your own experiences:

• Being spiritually grounded in obedience and enthusiastic service to a higher power.
• Having wealth, power, fame, wisdom and influence to acquire your desires.
• Enjoying happiness, contentment and satisfaction from any source you can access.
• Loving being loved and loving others.
• Exploring the freedom to experience life without judgment.
• Becoming your best self through continuous learning, growing and improving
• Being kind, sensitive and generous anonymously.
• Overcoming extreme adversity with hope, effort and admirable tenacity.
• Living a good life around the important values you hold dearest.

Being patient in getting enough peace of mind requires going through two doors at three different levels. The two doors to patience and peace of mind are: Humility and Empathy. Life takes you through these two doors at three different levels and times—First in your head, next in your heart, and finally in your bones for full understanding, when you stop talking about these things and start demonstrating them for others to see.

HUMILITY

Consciously striving to give up your cumbersome ego for some refreshing humility is what Alan Watts used to liken to trying to taste your tongue tasting, hear your ears hearing, or lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. The more humble you try to become, the more your ego takes the credit and the bigger it becomes, while actual humility shrinks.

The greatest opportunity to become humble naturally presents itself every day. We can start taking advantage of these opportunities to become genuinely humble when we: (a) stop avoiding difficult conflicts that are painful in the three areas of us vs. life, us. vs. others, and sometimes us vs. us, and (b) start accepting inevitable failure and change as the golden opportunity to be freer to really learn what you may need to learn to go from just surviving to thriving. The first wave of utility comes at you when you open up to the epiphany of realizing how little you really know, despite your hard work, as compared to all that you don’t know.

EMPATHY

Gaining true empathy for others often requires a willingness to go through extremely painful experiences with the darker side of life. Most often, it is the experience of getting back the wrong-doing you have offended others with, going from villain to victim and seeing both in the mirror at the same time. These empathy-building experiences usually happen when you are confronted with an undeniable failure, which your ego has protected you from acknowledging, at least until that can no longer happen because you are beginning to become more humble.

So you see, humility and empathy are connected at the hip so to speak, where you go through these two door at three deeper levels for more in-depth understanding of the answers to any questions you can ask. Empathy is solidified when you accept the ultimate reality that apparent opposites are really not so, but rather just different sides to the same coin. Then you begin to stop judging one side being better than the other, but rather both being equally valuable, like Dolly Parton said about “rainbows needing both the sun and the rain.”

At the end of the day, we may discover that we are all born with quite enough peace of mind and all that we have done here is to relearn what we have all forgotten due to what happened in-between birth and death—life! This realization is the likely result of exercising enough patience to have enough peace of mind by going through the Humility and Empathy doors at the three levels—first in your heart, then in your mind and then finally in your bones, for full understanding. You then start seeing and talking less and start looking and listening more to relearn what you have forgotten.

“The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.” ~Mehmet Oz.