Life Lessons

Some lessons are easy. Some are hard. Some come around again and again until we finally get them.

And they keep coming, right up until the day you pass over. If you are still alive, you are still learning.

The whisper

Guidance starts as a soft whisper.

A passing thought. A small unease you cannot quite name. A remark from a stranger that lands harder than it should.

If you listen at the whisper, the lesson costs you almost nothing. A small change, a quiet correction, done.

But we are human, and we are busy, and whispers are easy to talk ourselves out of. It usually happens when we are in a situation we want, hope, believe or wish will change for the better, even though we know deep down it will not. We all want to believe that this time might be different.

So the volume goes up.

The whisper becomes a tap on the shoulder. The tap becomes a knock. The knock becomes a door slamming somewhere in your life.

And if you still do not listen, it goes thermonuclear. The job ends, the back gives out, the relationship boils over, and the thing you would not look at arrives in a form you cannot look away from.

By then you should have listened a long time ago.

We have all been there, and that includes me. It is part of being human.

Lessons are a circle

Here is a stark example, and I want to say first that it is NOT about blame.

Say your relationships keep failing in the same way. You keep attracting people who treat you as second best.

At the start it all looks brilliant. You might even get a gut feeling about the person early on, and choose to ignore it, because the rose coloured glasses are doing their job.

Time passes. New love becomes comfortable love, and the interest they showed at the start quietly fades. Slowly it dawns on you that you have been here before. You see them with open eyes, and you see the truth of them.

You hope things will change. Eventually you accept that your time with this person has to end, and you move on.

Then comes a period of mourning, and after it a period of reflection, and one question.

Why does this keep happening to me?

That question is the fork in the road. If you are ready to face the lesson, you go inward and work out why you keep attracting this kind of person, and the circle breaks. If you are not ready, you go back to the start of the circle and the cycle begins again.

Each time you repeat the cycle, the universe turns up the volume of your lesson. A whisper, then a small voice, then a big voice, until the lesson is so loud you can hear it from the moon.

You only break the circle when you GET the lesson.

And whether you get it hinges on being ready. You might be screaming inside, please, not this again, I cannot do this again. But somewhere inside, a part of you is not quite ready to learn it and put it behind you.

Repeating the level

If you have ever played a video game, you already know how this works.

You miss a clue, you fail the checkpoint, and you play the level again. Sometimes you play it so many times you can predict it to the second and know what is around the next corner. Then you open the right door, read the right letter, and you are through.

Life here works the same way. You have quests to complete, lessons to learn, and clues all around you to help you move to the next level. The Signs and Signposts page is about learning to find them.

The faster you can spot your patterns, the faster the lessons land, and the fewer laps you do.

When it comes out of nowhere

Some lessons arrive with no whisper that you noticed. A curve ball out of the blue that rocks your world to the core. I have had those.

At those times it becomes very clear what is of value. Money, possessions and status pale into insignificance. Love matters. Compassion, support, unconditional giving, empathy. Bringing those into your life now gives you solid ground to stand on when the hard ones come.

A few years ago I had a run of serious health issues. Life was clearly screaming at me to listen. So while it was all going on, I stayed very focused on the message I was being given.

What I took from it is this. Embrace lessons when they come. They are sometimes inconvenient. They are sometimes downright intrusive into your life. They are there for you.

When you are driving into the sun, you can curse the glare, or you can pull down the visor and enjoy the sunset.

Step back and be the third person observer of your own life. What is the common theme in all of this? What message do you feel is being told to you? If you are not sure, ask the universe to give you guidance on it. The universe will always respond.

And when you are faced with two choices you do not like and no intuitive answer for either, make no decision. When you are unsure, the best decision is always no decision. The universe will make the path ahead impossible to miss, usually with an event or a conversation that turns the situation to night and day.

Hindsight is greasy walls

Once a lesson has landed, the temptation is to go back and judge yourself for not seeing it sooner.

Hindsight is a trap with greasy walls.

You cannot climb back up to the moment you were in. Every time you try, you slide straight back down to now, holding nothing but regret.

At the time, you made what you thought was the best decision for the best outcome you could see. Even when you went against your guidance, part of you hoped the guidance was wrong, or that it would turn out better than expected. The clarity you have now was never available then.

So accept that you did your best, and take the lesson. Loving yourself and forgiving yourself is the path forward. Living in the past keeps you there.

You cannot change a past decision. You can change your perspective of it, and how it affects your life from this point on.

Dead ends are part of the learning too. When you see a path is not for you, acknowledge the lesson, close that door, and smile that you saw it.

Something to sit with

What is being offered to you at a whisper right now?

Which lesson has taken you a few laps?

And what is one thing you can do today that future you will thank you for?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.

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