My 7 Key Life Lessons for Friends and All
From a 60-Year Journey of Learning and Discovery
Life is not a problem to be solved; Life is an adventure to be experienced. My life has not been a bed of roses, nor a string of breaks and blessings, nor a journey on the rough and crooked road with signages warning of pot-holes, pitfalls, and clear directions to destinations unknown.
Growing up is a series of experiments;
Of wandering without purpose among strange people posing as relatives, family, friends and enemies disguised;
Of learning subjects and topics to discover later of their utter uselessness for effective living;
Of working in meaningless underpaid jobs to produce products and services which add little value to customers;
Of having branded things of little utility to impress people whom I don’t like and who don’t care about me;
Of being misled and deceived by man-made beliefs, rituals and religions that make empty promises of a better life in the future worlds of some multiverse; and
Of navigating dense natural forces and fake evangelists, and advocates feeding untruths, half-truths, true lies and half-lies.
Life’s process of learning, relearning, and unlearning have continued relentlessly through the later years of my life. After more than 6 decades, the following 7 life lessons are continuously reminded and reinforced in so many life experiences such that they may be regarded as key core and universal lessons.
1) Happiness Results from Making Others Happy
Everywhere, we see marketing efforts promising happiness and better self-esteem. Born as the most beautiful baby, we somehow began gradually to become imperfect, too dark, too fair, too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, nose not centralised between the ears, ears not on the same level, eyes not at the same level, too stupid, too slow and simply too wrong in everything … so that plentiful products and services are available to restore your original beauty! Have you ever wondered why, while borne an Original, so many are spending so much time and money to become imitations of some famous singers, actors, handsome persons, beauty queens, or their movie idols?
So many people spend much of their life looking for happiness; for someone to love, to be loved, and to be accepted for what they truly are. Happiness is in fact found in the passion of living, in efforts to create joyful moments in a child or others, and in the resulting meaning, purpose, and great satisfaction when creating happy moments and joyful events which bring out happy responses in others. You can have happiness now. Be happy from just giving.
2) Be Different From the Rest, Not Better Than The Best
Each one is born more different than we could ever imagine. Different shape, colour, anatomy, parents, circumstances, intellect, preferences, temper, and tastes. And then some. The insane fear by so many of someone better than themselves has no foundation. Everyone is better than everyone else, for the simple reason that everyone is different from everyone else. You are the best yourself. There is none better than you being yourself.
Only you can be yourself. We are obsessed with locating “the Best”; the most popular, most beautiful, the fastest, highest, smallest or the largest … etc. Why? Recognising and respecting diversity means highlighting your own strengths and unique characteristics, personality, skills or styles. Look into the mirror, ask: “who can do what you do in the best way that you do them?”. The answer is “Nobody”. Today, discover the strength of your talents.
3) Change is The Only Permanent Thing in Life
Permanent change happens. It is not a material question of “what causes what?”. Changes are synchronous or “coincidental”. Nothing actually “causes” them. This acausal approach unpacks alternative thinking and ideas for solutions instead of seeking blame and retribution. It is not concerned with “what happened?” but “what it means?”.
Adopting a strategic longer-term perspective empowers me to understand that the only unchanging law of the universe is constant ceaseless change. My new mindware thinks holistically of the parts in the whole and of their relationship to each other. The conventional win-lose logic from Western philosophy does not appeal to me. Instead, the yin-yang dualism embedded in the ancient Chinese cosmology book Yijing (I- Ching) emboldens my perspective that all things are inseparable from their opposites. The vectors of change, as outcomes from the confluence of opposite forces, can all be valid when considered concurrently for an effective change intervention.
The most powerful change management approach sees opposing forces as reconcilable since they are parts of a bigger interacting whole and therefore can be synthesised as new solutions of managed change. This approach is possible with the dualism mindset of Yijing (I-Ching) from the Chinese language itself.
For example, the Chinese word for “crisis” is the combination of the words “danger” and “opportunity”. It internalises and embraces a remarkable comfort to be in bed with both ambiguity and uncertainty concurrently. Mentally, the Chinese have merged two opposite notions of “danger” and “opportunity” to create the new prospective word of “crisis”, whereby one would find within any change crisis the seeds of awesome opportunity.
4) Gods Must be Useful and Functional (for those who are religious)
I remember some tribes in Mexico and elsewhere who dispersed and faded away when their divinely promised rains did not come to nourish their crops of life-sustaining food. Their Gods/gods failed them, often after receiving the sacrifices of their most beautiful young virgin girls. Those who survived the ensuing famine finally left their villages in great hunger and faded into obscurity.
The same delusion happens in these modern days, with so many believers continuing to hold fast the failed promises preached regularly by self-ordained high priests of fake man-made Gods/gods. Open your eyes, people! Look around the world. The poorest and most vulnerable people are also mostly the most religious believers in man-made religions. Most prayers simply do not work and were never answered — and these high priests knew! Any “abundant” life promised to believers of man-made religions is characterised by poverty, want, pain and disappointments. They are lulled and deluded by their high priests, often using human psychology and the science of economics, to blame themselves for their conditions.
They blind their believers to the obvious and glaring abundance enjoyed by themselves, unbelievers as well as others who are less righteous and criminals, and the gullible, naïve mass of believers accept their fate to be vastly poorer and hungrier to value instead some divine end-goal that they would finally inherit the kingdom of God. Indeed, the poor believers have inherited the trash, sand, mud, wastelands, and deserts, while every resource, food, and built infrastructure are owned and controlled by the powerful others.
The current covid-19 pandemic has emptied out churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship, driving believers from their non-existent Gods/gods in their supposed divine but man-made dwellings! Be not confused, wake up. Get rid of your man-made Gods/gods who failed to answer their simple “divine” promise to “give what you asked”. Believe in yourself.
5) Blood is Not Usually Thicker Than Water
We did not choose our parents or our siblings. So, neither did we choose our relatives or in-laws. When you have grown up in a loving environment of care, love, and mutual concern, you would have been blessed by such positive emotions of compassion, sympathy, and empathy to affect and infect those around you. Often, such qualities can also develop in the absence of conducive family values. It is very common that in-laws can quickly become out-laws, but they are not blood relations. Often too, others unrelated to us show more understanding, kindness, generosity, and love than in-laws and blood relations.
I have learned that “family” refers more to the circle of human beings, irrelevant as to whether related by blood, who reach out with timely hands of care and friendship to relieve our pain, suffering, inconvenience, and discomfort. Be a “family” member to the vulnerable in society and all who are needed to grasp your hands of hope.
6) Eradicate Toxic Relationships
How many of you are surrounded by so-called friends, co-workers, and relatives who only feel good by feeling better than you, by making you feel small, ugly, inadequate, stupid, unbeautiful, and dim-witted? You feed their ego. They suck out your youthful zest and self-esteem so as to feel superior by pushing you down in the gutter. They do not enhance your sense of well-being, motivate your efforts or encourage you towards your fuller potential.
So, why do you hang around them? Afraid of loneliness? Fear of making new, better friends? Wallowing in victimhood and addiction to their toxicity? You can be better, and happier. Just get rid of toxic relationships now, whoever they are. Check out the 21 signs of toxic relationships.
7) The Only Important Thing in Life is Love
Only love is real. It is the only true reality. This positive passion towards your fellow human beings, other creatures, and the environment is perhaps the only nurturing value sensation for wholesome human development. Many would remember the safe embrace of your mother moments after birth while being nourished and nurtured by her milk. We yearn to return to those moments. True, we can only be hurt by those we love, but we can always be healed, emboldened, and empowered by those who also love us to do anything that impacts them with joy and happiness.
The common experience of many is one of waiting and struggling with a pervading sense of futility in the face of receding from the reach of happiness as one progresses in years. The skeptics shouted, “It’s not even possible to talk about the Truth”. The frustration of finding Truth is the integral part of his painful anguish in the loneliness of the man seeking Love. The anguish of loneliness lies in one’s persistence in a meaningless world without any significant others to love and share his life with. Feelings of love are universal and the only reality. Our only reality has been with those whom you love and who love us.
My discovery and learning journey continue. The lessons from learning, relearning, and unlearning are continuously reinforced for as long as I navigate through this uncertain, turbulent, and increasingly complex world.
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