Life Lessons

Okay, this post is not at all funny. In fact, it's me venting about something I'm quite close to, and a few lessons I've learned. The next post I make will most likely be in this same vein, but on a different subject, so just bear with me for a little bit. Hopefully, the humor will return in short order.

Anyway...there are a few things in this life that I just can't abide. I've had a relatively full life, and I've learned a lot of lessons, and it irks me beyond belief when others have had it either harder or easier than me, and haven't managed to learn those lessons, too. Or, they learn the lessons life tries to teach them, but they refuse to apply them significantly, instead relying on "book learnin'" to make their decisions and make up their minds for them. You were given lessons by "life" (or God, or Buddah, or whomever it is you believe in) for a reason; it was in hopes that you would apply those lessons liberally to every day life. When you fail to do that, I think that "life" doesn't like it very much, and it may very well come around to bite you in the ass. It might not happen today, or tomorrow, but it will eventually happen.

One of those lessons that I think a lot of people miss is the lesson that yes, as a human being, things will sometimes be your fault. Regardless of what your school teachers or your parents have told you, you are not perfect. Regardless of what you've read in scholarly tomes about the way business and life is supposed to run, there are going to be mistakes no matter how closely you follow the instructions. When those mistakes happen, step back and evaluate the situation. If you had a hand in the mistake, freakin' admit it. Don't blame everyone else around you. It's not always everyone else's fault.

The next lesson that I've learned and I think some of the world has missed is that there are not conspiracies around every corner. In any group of people, opinions will occasionally align. It's most often for different reasons, but just because they align doesn't mean that a conspiracy has formed. I came to my opinion on my own, and I did that through my own internal review of the facts that were presented to me, and through no one's influence upon me. Just because my opinion happens to be the same as two, four, eight - hell, a hundred people - doesn't mean that we all got together and said, "yes, this will bother the one who hasn't learned that particular lesson. Let's make this decision." We arrived by our opinions independently and for our own reasons - I can't state that enough - and they are our own possessions. I'm sorry if you don't like them, but the fault, in this case, is in you.

The last lesson is one of tolerance. In the wide picture, people think that this is reserved for things like race and religion and sexual preference, but that's not all that tolerance can be applied to. In organizations that I belong to, decisions get made, and I don't always 100% agree with them. Things don't go my way all the time, and because I have learned the lesson of tolerance, I'm okay with that. My presence in the organization is more important to me than being right. I can tolerate and even get behind what I might think of as a "bad decision" for the good of the organization. I'm able to put aside my ego like that because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (or the one). If the lessons of tolerance had been learned (or applied), perhaps people wouldn't be as quick to take their ball and go home rather than play the game to their best ability even with a change in the rules.

I can't say that I learned these rules quick, or that the learning process was easy; it wasn't. I'm still young (thank goodness) and I have ample opportunity in front of me to continue to put these lessons into practice. I just hope that others can find happiness in ignorance, in fleeing, and in paranoia. I couldn't, before I learned those lessons. That's why I chose to learn.