For Whom Does Your Bell Toll?
No event touches our life that does not have a use in our overall development. Gregge Tiffen (LIFE: The Staircase of Many Steps – January, 2008)
More and more I find myself curious about what I’m learning from every event in life. Even when that learning isn’t so clear that I can articulate it, I have this sense of embracing life’s events as a learning lab for my evolution.
We seem to do that easily with life’s so-called ‘challenges’. Part of how many of us navigate those events is to acknowledge that they are part of ‘life’s lessons’. That’s where I found my own awareness this week as I faced a computer challenge. What was the learning of spilling liquid on my keyboard and watching the screen go blank?
The obvious is ‘keep liquids away from keyboards’, a lesson I assumed I knew, but certainly didn’t apply. We often discount this level of learning as not important, but even learning to tie our shoes (something most of now do without much thought) has value beyond the surface in the connections it makes. How is it that we learn to deftly move our fingers to form bows that secure our shoes on our feet? And, what in that learning do we apply to hundreds (maybe thousands) of tasks every day?
Events like this wake me up and pull me out of my tendency to not be present in each moment. It reminded me that although drinking a cup of tea while using the computer isn’t rocket science, I’m better served if I do so with awareness and care. The event also gave me the opportunity to choose how much to beat myself up (very little, I’m happy to report), to do what I could in the moment (turn the keyboard upside down and lightly blow a hair dryer across it), and then to let it be.
Letting it be proved to be easier than I thought. Perhaps I’ve learned that I can only do what I can do, and energy exerted after that is wasted. Since the event happened on the weekend, I took time to make a plan for getting critical tasks done on Monday. I shed some cleansing tears. With gratitude and faith, I asked the Universe to assist. Then, I went to bed. When I woke, I didn’t rush to see if the computer would power up. I didn’t even think about it as I engaged in my morning rituals. In hindsight, I have a sense of personal satisfaction about that.
Then, late morning before heading out for a long walk with Luke, I thought about the computer and decided to discover whether it would turn on. It did. Wowza!
I felt deep gratitude, not only for having my computer, but for the event and the learning that it brought forth. The cleansing tears that followed, those were tears of joy.
Life is learning. Learning is life. We cannot ‘not learn’, but we can choose to not embrace life as the learning lab that it is.
What is your choice?