• A Guidline For Living

Humans have sought to discover the meaning of life for a very long time, What we and our ancestors have overlooked however, in the course of this endless search, is that there is no one answer.

The meaning of life is different for each individual, as we each have our own unique path. However, there are universal guidelines that can be useful to anybody.

• Live & Learn

Perhaps one useful guideline that will serve us all well on our unique journey through life in the hope of finding happiness and fulfillment, is when we approach life with the mindset that we have an opportunity to learn from our life's experience along every step of the way. In this sense, when we LIVE & LEARN, we see that, for every action or event, there is something that can be learned from it. Therefore we view those 'bad' or 'negative' times in our life, not as intrinsically bad times in which to dwell in and complain about, or even try to forget, but rather as opportunities in which we can learn a great deal from – both about life and about our self. Whether we choose to learn from these situations, which we all encounter, and the causes of them, is entirely up to us – but if we decide not to, then we will be destined to repeat them, whereas to decide to learn from experience can only help us in transcending negative experiences and therefore find happiness and fulfillment in our lifetime.

As we begin to learn about life and ourself, we also begin to learn valuable insights – from both experiences that we would normally deem 'bad' and also from 'enjoyable' experiences. In this sense, we can come to view all of our experiences as possessing value that can help us grow as individuals, regardless of where they stand on the 'enjoyment' scale. And by living life in this way, and especially learning from, and being sensitive too, those experiences that are unpleasant and cause us pain or hardship, we can actually learn to understand why certain situations cause us suffering – and then by taking on board the 'lesson learned' and understanding gained, we will learn how to deal with and move on from difficult situations. We will grow. And through personal growth and expanding our understanding, we will also be more likely to meet and overcome other challenges in life, simply because of the lessons we have learned in the past. Just by learning, we improve our chances of finding happiness and fulfillment.

What we do need to accept though is that life in itself can be difficult. It will entail both suffering and joy, ups & downs, good times and not so good times. This is simply how life is. And at times life may appear to be very unfair, yet it is something that we need to accept. Facing this truth is quite difficult - because many think that life should be as easy as a sunday stroll in the park. Therefore when we encounter hardships of any kind, we moan, internally or externally, more or less incessantly, with quips such as "its not fair", and we feel sorry for ourselves and become victims of fate and casualties of circumstance, wallowing in the apparent injustice of it all. However, if we accept that life will at times present us with hardship and actually learn to see value in all our experiences, then we will view these hardships instead as challenges, which, if overcome. will give us valuable insights and understanding on our path to happiness and fulfillment.

Personal Growth

Human growth through learning is a process of experimentation, trial, and error, ultimately leading to wisdom and understanding. Each time we undertake a course of action, we can never be sure how the situation will turn out. Sometimes we are 'victorious', and sometimes we become dissillusioned. The failed experiments, however, are no less valuable than the experiments that ultimately prove successful; in fact, we usually learn more from our perceived "failures" than we do from our perceived "successes".

Most people feel great disappointment and anger when their plans in which they've invested a great deal of time and energy in don't come off. The first reaction for most of us is to feel that we have failed. But rather than viewing our perceived mistakes as failures – we can view them as an opportunity to learn and improve. Every situation in which we do not live up to our own expectations is an opportunity to learn something important about our own thoughts and behaviours. And every situation in which we feel "wronged" by another person is a chance to learn something about our reactions. (Infact Carl Jung stated that "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a greater understanding of ourselves"). But whether it is our "wrongdoing" or someone else's, a mistake is simply an opportunity to learn from in order to move further along our path of personal growth and development. And by learning from our mistakes, we can also forgive ourselves for any "wrongful" actions which we may have made in the past.

When we consider the hardships of life – the dissapointments, hurts, losses, illnesses, all the tragedies we may suffer – and shift our perception to see them as valued opportunities for learning and growth, we become empowered. We take charge of our life and rise to its challenges, instead of wallowing in feelings of depression and victimhood.

An old story that illustrates this quite well is from The Speed of Light, by Gwyneth Cravens;

Asad told her story. It was about a young girl from Morocco whose father was a spinner. He became prosperous in his craft, and took her with him on a voyage in the Mediterranean. He wanted to sell his thread, and told his daughter hat she should look also for a young man who would make her a good husband. But a storm caused the ship to flounder near Egypt, killing the father and casting the daughter ashore. Miserable and exhausted, barely able to remember her previous life, the girl wandered in the sand until she finally met a family of weavers. They took her in and taught her how to make cloth for a living. Eventually she became quite contented.

But after a few years, she was captured on the seashore by slavers who then sailed East to Istanbul and took her to its slave market. A man who made ships' masts went to the market to buy slaves to help him with his work, but when he noticed the girl, he took pitty on her, bought her, and took her home to serve his wife. But pirates stole the cargo he invested in, and he was unable to buy the other slaves. He, the girl, and his wife had to make all the masts themselves. The girl worked hard and conscientiously. The mast maker found her to be so capable that he eventually granted her freedom and made her a partner in his business, which she came to enjoy.

One day he asked her to accompany a shipment of masts to Java. She agreed, but off the coast of China the ship was struck by a typhoon. Again she was washed up on a strange seashore, and again she cried out against her fate. "Why do these bad things keep happening to me?" she asked. No answer came. She got up out of the sand and started walking inland.

There was a legend in China that a foreign women would appear and make a tent for the emperor. Because nobody in China knew how to make tents, the whole population, including one generation of emperors after another, wondered about this prediction. Once a year, the emperor sent out emissaries to every town to bring all the foreign women to the royal court.

In due course the ship-wrecked women arrived before the emperor, who asked her through an interpretor if she could make a tent. "I think I can," she said. She asked for rope, but the Chinese had none, and so recalling her childhood as the daugher of a spinner, she asked for silk and spun it into rope. She asked for thick cloth, but the Chinese had none, and so recalling her life among the weavers, she wove the kind of cloth used for tents. She asked for tent poles, but again the Chinese had none, and so recalling her life with the mast maker, she made tent poles. When she had all these things ready, she tried to remember as best she could the tents she had seen throughout her life, especially those in Istanbul. At last she put together a tent. The emperor marvelled at the construction, and at the fulfillment of the old prophecy, and offered whatever she wished. She married a handsome prince, remained in China surrounded by her children, and lived to a happy old age. And she realized that although her adventures had seemed terrible when they were happening, what she learned turned out to be essential for her ultimate happiness.

Freeing Ourselves from repeating Negative Patterns

If we fail to see that life's hardships can be viewed as challenges which can be overcome, that can provide us with greater understanding and wisdom through learning from experience – then we will be destined to dwell in times of hardship, perhaps indefinately, and we will continue to repeat the negative patterns that cause us hardship and suffering, ultimately stunting our personal growth and development.

Several years ago, Bill Murray starred in a film called Groundhog Day, in which he woke up in the same day over and over until he actually learned what he needed to do in that day. The same events kept repeating themselves until he finally "got" what he was supposed to do in each one. Does this strike a funny but familiar chord with you?

In order to free ourself from continually repeating difficult patterns or 'mistakes', we need to shift our perspective so that we can recognize the patterns and learn what we need to do in order to overcome them and move on from them. We could try to avoid or escape from confronting and trying to recognize these negative patterns, but ultimately all that will mean is that they will simply keep repeating until either the day we die, or the day when we pluck up the courage to eventually recognize and confront these negative patterns which are stunting our personal growth and chances of finding happiness and fulfilment.

The challenge then is to identify and release the negative patterns that we are repeating, and this is by no means an easy task, since it means that we will have to change, and change is not always easy, and rising to the challenge of identifying and releasing negative patterns forces us to admit that the way we have been doing things is not quite working. The good news is that through identifying and releasing the patterns, we actually learn how to change. There are five basic steps that we need to learn in order to do this;

1. Awareness is the process of becoming conscious of and recognizing the negative patterns or issues that entrap you, and this opportunity to look within and identify those patterns that keep you stuck presents itself every time you feel a sense of discontent in your life, by becoming sensitive of your inner feelings, intuitions or outward behaviour. Thus learning to develop awareness is one of the key factors in progressing along the path of personal growth.

2. Ackowledgement – is the process of admiting that we we need to release the negative pattern

3. Choice – is the process of actively selecting to release the pattern. If you truly want to change, then it must ultimately because you choose to do it, rather than thinking that you should do it

4. Strategy – represents the process of creating a realistic plan to release the pattern and will require patience and commitment, because change and growth can be a slow process and often first efforts may not live up to expectation.

5. Celebration – The act of rewarding yourself for changing the pattern

It may seem like just when you think you have learned all there is to learn – then another of lifes challenges springs up almost immediately. But what we must realize is that life itself can be deemed a continual learning process - and it is the learning process itself that brings true value to existence. And as we continue to learn as our life unfolds, our wisdom grows and so does our capacity to deal with challenges. Wisdom, the highest and deepest degree of knowledge, insight and understanding provides us with the broadest perspective on life, and therefore, as we continue to learn, the depth of our wisdom increases, our capacities expand proportionately, allowing us to take on and solve with greater ease more advanced challenges, ultimately helping us to find real happiness and fulfillment.

The above piece of writing is largely a personal interpretation of some of the points raised in Cherie Carter-Scott's book; If Life is a Game, These are the Rules, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1999. It is recommend reading for those who wish to find out a bit more on the lessons that can be learned in Life