I didn't write this but I have read it before and stumbled across it this weekend. It's worth reading again. I want to think more about the different rules and see where my thinking takes me...That is one of the things I love about good writing - that someone manages to capture in just a few lines some of the profoundest things about the human condition. It's like that all too often quoted line by TS Elliot: We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know it for the first time.
To me this Elliot quote is apt with regard to the "Rules" below, because it is like reading all these thousands of books on why we're here and how to be better people and love ourselves and find our purpose yaddah yaddah...and then I find this short piece of writing which captures so elegantly some of the aspects of being human, which I knew all along! Yet reading this, it is like arriving where we started and knowing it for the first time. I no longer know if I am making sense but alas I must stop writing and try to make some money.
The Rules for Being Human
- You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
- You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a fulltime informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.
- There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "works."
- A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
- Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive there are lessons to be learned.
- "There" is no better than "here." When your "there" has become a "here" you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here."
- Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
- What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
- Your answers lie inside you. The answer to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
- This will often be forgotten, only to be remembered again.
