life as a classroom

how many times do we need to learn something until it sticks?

The Midnight Garden by Angie Latham

I laid down on the massage table as my massage therapist dug her strong hands into my hips, my hamstrings, my quads. She was teasing out knots I had so diligently built up by sitting like a pretzel every day, shrugging my shoulders up to my ears and contorting my legs over each other to get the most satisfying possible angle of leverage over the tiny keyboard I am so attentively trying not to hunch over right now.

You need to stop crossing your right leg over your left. She said sternly. She then moved to the other side and exclaimed: and you need to stop crossing your left leg over your right! I sheepishly agreed. I had been feeling, for the first time in notable memory, mild lower back pain, the awakening of an old ankle injury, and tension that was creeping steadily up the muscles flanking my spine. I could tell that I was doing something—the way I was moving, the way I was sitting—to create a sense of imbalance and unease in my body that I wanted to correct.

I asked her how to stop sitting asymmetrically, what my posture should look like, what the effects would be if I didn’t correct these habits. We talked for a while. At the end of the conversation she noted that she had told me this same thing—to stop crossing my legs—many times before, but this was the first time I seemed sincerely interested in what she was saying, that I asked questions, that I really listened. For whatever reason, this time it stuck. Why? She wanted to know. And so did I. Why did I suddenly seem to care? Why was I just starting to learn?

what makes lessons stick?

I wrote this tweet a little while ago about how once we achieve a certain level of basic quality of life, our experience scales proportionally to how fast we learn what life is trying to teach us.

Tweet link

I’ve been toying with this idea for some time now that life is just a big classroom. Everything that happens to us is trying to teach us something. I adopted this view because (1) I think looking for the ‘medicine’ or the learning in each moment—especially the hard ones—is way more pleasant than assuming bad things serve no purpose other than to punish you, and (2) because it makes me more attentive and lucid to what I can learn every day.

One way to notice that you are being taught the same lesson over and over is by writing. When you reflect often, you become aware of your patterns (if you are willing to notice them). You see that life keeps trying to teach you the same lesson and you are simply not absorbing it. It tries to teach you by showing you that the choice you’re repeatedly making will give you the same (unpleasant) experience until you make a different choice. It is—metaphorically speaking—writing the same lesson on the chalkboard of your personal classroom repeatedly and you just keep forgetting to take notes. And in the classroom that is your life, if you don’t write down what is on the chalkboard, it keeps appearing until you do.

So, as I sat there, talking to my massage therapist about something she had told me many times before, and something that, quite honestly, I knew I needed to change well before she pointed it out, I asked myself: Why do I care now? Why am I suddenly writing down this lesson that has been written on the chalkboard of my life-classroom many times over in different fonts, words, and permutations?

The blunt answer is that I was paying attention because this problem was starting to cause me pain. I was starting to tangibly see (feel) the consequences of my actions, of my unwillingness to learn the lesson. I was now experiencing a hint of the initial suffering that was destined to come if I failed to integrate this lesson. And because of that pain, I was finally ready to learn.

pain as a teacher

One thing that almost always compels us towards action, or at least deeper reflection, is pain. When we begin to suffer, we start looking for the lesson that will lessen our suffering. This ‘hunger’ for an antidote helps us learn quickly. This is fairly well-understood: when pain gets sufficiently intense that it demands most of our conscious awareness, we finally crack and say: okay, what’s wrong and what do I need to do to heal?

There’s this fable I once heard that goes something like this: a stranger walks past a family’s house as they are sitting on their porch with a dog lying at their feet. The dog is moaning and groaning. The stranger asks: why is your dog moaning? The family says: because he is sitting on a nail. The stranger asks: why doesn’t he get up? And the family says: because it doesn’t hurt bad enough.

Because it doesn’t hurt bad enough.

I love this story because it’s so piercingly human. How often are we moaning and groaning about something that we know is hurting us, but it doesn’t hurt bad enough for us to actually get up and change it? I think about this in the context of life trying to teach us lessons, because often, when we are moaning about some pain, the lesson is already up there on the chalkboard waiting to be noticed, but for whatever reason we are failing to to look up, write it down and integrate it.

So what I’m trying to figure out is: how can we recognize the first moan and get up immediately? Or: how can we absorb the lesson as soon as we are primed for it?

does a part of us enjoy the pain?

There is also the Existential Kink philosophy around some people secretly enjoying the pain or the ignorance of not absorbing the lesson—which I think does have validity. Is there a part of us that actually likes the pattern we claim to resent? Is there a part of us that enjoys whatever circumstance we are moaning and groaning about, allegedly wishing would change but secretly are hanging on to from some forbidden place of pleasure? Are we getting some unconscious relief from what we consciously perceive to be painful? It reminds me of that Alicia Keys line from Fallin’:

How do you give me so much pleasure, and cause me so much pain?

She’s talking about a lover that makes her feel the deepest polarities of love, but also pain, resentment, anguish. Of course, there is the obvious answer of what to do if someone is causing you pain (communicate, address their behaviour and if they fail to change, leave) but sometimes despite this “obvious” answer, we don’t apply that lesson.

Consider the person you know who is always finding themselves in the same relationship dynamic or pattern—one that clearly seems to be harmful to them. No matter how much of the ‘right advice’ they get from their friends, nothing will change until they have had enough of this pain. They might just—in the Existential Kink lens—be enjoying that pain on some level, or enjoy the positive aspects more than they want to stop the negative ones. For whatever reason, they have concluded (often unconsciously) that they don’t need to learn that lesson yet. This could change as their pattern continues to play out and they eventually endure enough pain that they want to change their circumstances.

But: if we are someone that wants to learn, grow and change actively and often, then what is keeping us from doing so? Why does it take so long for us to see what we are not seeing, and by extension: apply it?

patterns and blind spots

Our patterns are sticky, unconscious and hard to spot when we’re in them. Patterns are there because the part of you that is creating them has not changed. You act based on your current understanding of the world and of yourself. If you want to change how you act, you need to change your understanding. What’s that Einstein line? Insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Eventually, you need to get fed up with your own insanity and change your approach. And to change your approach, you need to change your understanding: you need to change what you are by absorbing the lessons life is trying to teach you.

I liked

Ava

’s piece about how going to therapy helps you realize what you are in denial about, what your blind spots are that everyone around you can see except you. I would extrapolate this to the benefits of any steady, recurring container for reflection: it helps you see your blind spots, the things you’re in denial about. These are also called our shadow qualities: aspects of ourselves that are unconscious to us. The lessons about ourselves we haven’t learned yet. The things that everyone around you knows about you (because they’re usually quite obvious), but that you don’t know because you don’t want to know. You can stay blind to certain parts of yourself if you don’t want to see them. You can’t fully awaken until you have looked at yourself with humility, with full awareness that you *do not* understand yourself completely. Only then can you begin to learn, because only then are you truly open to the lesson.

And until you integrate the lesson by *applying* the learning the next time an opportunity to do so comes up in the classroom that is your life, it will continue being written on the chalkboard in an attempt to teach you. And hey: it’s okay if something shows up a bunch of times before you learn it—that’s being human (I’ve been told to stop sitting like a pretzel since I was in elementary school!). We are all blind until something starts to hurt. Then we smarten up and learn the lesson. But what if we could absorb these lessons before they start to punish us with pain, crisis or worse?

what can i learn that i don’t ‘need to know’ yet?

Lately I’ve been trying to ask myself questions each day like: what did I learn today? what did life try to teach me? what is written on the chalkboard? can I translate this into something instructive? can I apply this new learning somewhere in my life? This illuminates lessons before I desperately need them, before I am looking for them. I want to absorb what I can notice that I don’t yet need—lessons that can keep me from future pain by asking myself: what can I learn from where I am right now? Viewing life this way makes me more enthusiastic about engaging with it curiously on a daily basis. I don’t want to wait for pain to make me lucid. I want to be lucid every day by my own volition.

And if every day is just another day in the school of life, I want to know what I am meant to learn so that I can go home at the end of the day to review it, weave it into my worldview, solidify it, and layer new, interesting and more complex ideas onto it. One thing I learned from studying theoretical math is that if you pretend to know something you never properly absorbed, everything you stack on top of that pseudo-knowledge will be shaky. It’s much better to learn something completely before moving on to the ‘next’ lesson. Layering solid knowledge on top of itself is how we grow. And solid knowledge is created by learning something and then applying it—by embodying the knowledge through action.

life as a classroom

Look at life as your own personal classroom; a curriculum designed for the precise moment you are in, teaching you the lessons you’re meant to learn right now. The better you get at absorbing what is on the chalkboard, the more contact you can make with the present moment because you aren’t controlled by patterns you haven’t looked at. You can be learning every day. If you aren’t, you may not be paying attention. This is what I believe at least. You can disagree, but that may leave you with the self-fulfilling prophecy that “life is boring and I never learn anything new,” which doesn’t exactly feel like a more appealing alternative.

You can choose the story you want to embody. There absolutely is something for you to learn everyday, just look around: you can learn from the stranger next to you waiting to cross the street, from how the barista makes your coffee, from the way the person across the table looks at you, from how it feels to make your bed each morning.

Life is a classroom! Look up. It is trying to teach you. Every moment is a moment of divine opportunity and ecstasy waiting to be tapped into. Step outside of your ego and allow the learnings to flow in and find a home in you. Sometimes it is not about allowing the ‘learnings’ in, but allowing the moment in. The learnings flow from complete presence: from allowing yourself to be where you are. The learnings come from treating each new day like the intimate treasure it is.

There are always lessons on the chalkboard. I want you to learn yours so that your life can get better. I try to learn mine and share some of them with you here. But hey, I’m still learning. I’m a baby! I’m in kindergarten. There is so much left to learn. I wake up on my best days keen for what is going to be on the chalkboard; I want to know what life has to teach me. On my worst days, I dodge the chalkboard all day long, trying not to look, trying not to do the “work” I imagine learning to be. It feels too demanding, too heavy. But this is just another device of the mind: to think that being present and attentive is “work” or “effort”. It is not any of those things—it is a matter of allowing yourself to be where you are, rather than forcing yourself to be.

learning without attachment

Learning can be effortless—as long as you approach it with lightness, without attachment or expectation to how the moment is supposed to go, or what you are supposed to learn. It’s about showing up and being open to whatever is being taught in class that day, which can be hard because we like to know what to expect. We want to be prepared for class!

When you used to go to class as a kid, you knew you were walking into calculus or geography or creative writing, or whatever it might be. You signed up for a subject; you were prepared to learn a specific thing. But sometimes life is entirely impartial to what you want to learn, or what you identify as a student of. It teaches you what you need to learn. It gives you the medicine you need to swallow. And if you’re willing to send that medicine down your throat and into your being, you’ll be better off for it. Because the better you get at learning, the better you get at living. At showing up in the world with humility, wisdom and grace, ready for what life has to teach you. At never feeling above the moment you’re in. At living in alignment with what you’ve absorbed so far. At being willing to show up every day and take notes.

Everything flows from our willingness to learn. So, if you want to show up right now, in this moment, with a willingness to learn, then ask yourself: what is on the chalkboard of your life right now? Or: what is life trying to teach you?

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Announcement: I am now working 1-1 with individuals who want to understand themselves more deeply, cultivate alignment, and close the gap between their actions and their values. If you resonate with the ideas I write about and want to move more intentionally towards the life you desire, send an email to isabel@mindmine.school or DM me on Twitter for more details on what working together would look like.

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Related essays you might enjoy: forward momentum, embodying over appearing, on being selective, feel your feelings, and find novelty through commitment. You can also find me on Twitter for my daily thoughts.

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