THE CHAPTERS: life lessons

Chapter 1

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ

Authenticity 

Deep inside all of us, we know there is someone we were meant to be. And we can feel when we're becoming that person. The reverse is also true. We know when something's off and we're not the person we were meant to be.

Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy. Sometimes we look for these things in the faces of our loved ones, in religion, God, or other places where they reside.

Too often, however, we search for them in money, status, the "perfect" job, or other places, only to find that these things lack the meaning we had hoped to find and even bring us heartaches. Following these false trails without a deeper understanding of their meaning, we are inevitably left feeling empty, believing that there is little or no meaning to life, that love and happiness are simply illusions. Some people find meaning through study, enlightenment, or creativity. Others discover it while looking at unhappiness, or even death, directly in the eye.

Perhaps they were told by their doctors they had cancer or had only six months to live. Maybe they watched loved ones battle for life or were threatened by earthquakes or other disasters. They were at the edge. They were also on the brink of a new life.

Looking right into the "eye of the monster,'' facing death directly, completely and fully, they surrendered to it and their view of life was forever changed as they learned a lesson of life.

These people had to decide, in the darkness of despair, what they wanted to do with the rest of their life. Not all of these lessons are enjoyable to learn, but everyone finds that they enrich the texture of life. So why wait until the end of life to learn the lessons that could be learned now?

What are these lessons life asks us to master? In working with the dying and the living, it becomes clear that most of us are challenged by the same lessons: the lesson of fear, the lesson of guilt, the lesson of anger, the lesson of forgiveness, the lesson of surrender, the lesson of time, the lesson of patience, the lesson of love, the lesson of relationships, the lesson of play, the lesson of loss, the lesson of power, the lesson of authenticity, and the lesson of happiness.

Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You're not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you're at peace with yourself. Learning life's lessons is not about malung your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.

As one man shared, "I now delight in the imperfections of life." We're put here on earth to learn our own lessons. No one can tell you what your lessons are; it is part of your personal journey to discover them.

On these journeys we may be given a lot, or just a little bit, of the things we must grapple with, but never more than we can handle. Someone who needs to learn about love may be married many times, or never at all. One who must wrestle with the lesson of money may be given none at all, or too much to count.

We will look at life and living in this book, discovering how life is seen from its outer edge. We will learn that we are not alone, seeing instead how we are all connected, how love grows, how relationships enrich us.

Hopefully, we will correct the perception that we are weak, realizing that not only do we have power, we have all the power of the universe within ourselves. We will learn the truth about our illusions, about happiness and the grandness of who we really are. We will learn how we have been given everything we need to make our lives work beautifully.