The 10 Life Lessons I Learned From Jerome K. Jerome

They instil a refreshing perspective on matters of life, helping you turn over a new leaf by seeing things in a newer way.

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humorist from the mid 18th Century.

He is best known for his essays in the English world such as “The Man Who Was A Hospital” from the comic travel monologue “Three Men On a Boat.” One of my favorite essays as a child, and one that I still reminisce upon whenever I feel anxious.

His words speak volumes about the behavior of human beings, and the psyche they exhibit towards life’s challenging mysteries with a humorous twist.

His work challenges the rhetoric of how we see things, giving us a witty insight on how to stop caring about the futilities of life. They push us to start accepting ourselves and stop worrying about what will be.

Here are 10 lessons that aspire us to work for a positive change being in the present and taking care of ourselves.

“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

We stress overwork, a lot but we don’t need to. Sometimes, our life becomes so compacted that we lose the fun in our life. Thus, It is always best to not stress about the major things in life, because when push comes to shove we can ride the tide easily if we just relax and think calmly.

Time can pass away, with ease helping us to relieve ourselves of the stress that comes from working, and lack thereof.

The goal is to never overstress yourself with work that you can’t handle. Always try to strive for a relaxing mindset and you will be able to do any task with ease.

“It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.”

I was home alone the past weekend. Solitude without things to do can feel miserable. Thus I put an impossible task in front of me. I added a target to write 100 Haiku for the day. Sometimes you can become productive even when you’re alone and have nothing to do.

That’s what I did, I used my time to work. I started in the night at around midnight. I started writing drafts for ideas to write about. I was able to finish the first milestone for around 8 hours giving me an adrenaline rush.

I took breaks in between but my mind was excited by the thrill of writing and meeting the goal.

I have ADD, so I knew there is a breakthrough where I will completely stop working altogether. Thus, I made the impossible task of working myself off so that I will be engaged in doing what I love and that is poetry, a hobby I am fascinated by as much as photography.

The goal is to do the things you’re good at by setting an impossible goal that challenges you to enjoy as well as be productive in the most fruitful of ways possible. You will reach at least 50% of your goal according to my estimate, and the fulfillment you will receive while doing it is otherworldly.

“Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.”

When I am around people, sometimes it gets to the point that I need to escape from it all. Distancing myself from the social circle altogether. It drains my energy, and sometimes, you have to take a step back and steal a moment of solitude for yourself as well.

Social Company can be a good thing but there is a certain significance to gain solitude of mind, even for a little while. At times when you feel under the weather, it is better to improvise and change your mood by stealing a moment of peace to replenish yourself.

“It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.”

The truth hurts, and at times it can even damage your reputation. I remember the words of my teacher who told us a significant excerpt from his life. It said,

“Never tell the truth of other people, instead speak the truth about yourself.”

Truthfulness can be a great thing at times, it will help you gain insights and even you might shine as a pious soul.

But from my experience, at times the truth is so complex, that it is better to lie instead. My instructor used to tell me, only the best storytellers are exceptional liars as their words when written and read make the lines between the truth and lies seem blurred.

Truth can get you in trouble, but an exceptionally good lie can save you by the bell, and even save your life. I believe it to be the case. The goal is to choose words wisely, not truthfully — they should sound truthfully as exceptionally good lies that are believable.

“But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.”

I remember when my grandmother died, it was perhaps more than a decade ago and my father lost her beloved mother after she suffered from a heart attack. She had open-heart surgery a few weeks before.

My father would travel every day from his job to visit his mother, it would take him 4 hours of driving states every day to meet his mother, and check up on her health coming back to work in the morning.

My father had a great work ethic, but sadly my grandmother before a few weeks before she died insisted she wanted to go back home. The people there didn’t treat her well. Thus, because of coming short on her actual prescribed diet, they fed her with food that can make even a grown man sick.

This perhaps took a toll on her health and she suffered a heart attack a few days afterward. At the funeral, his relatives proceeded to ask how would we be able to arrange the money for the funeral proceedings. My father who had just lost her mother had to deal with the kinds of stupidity people around him possessed.

I believe sometimes, you have to be patient and not react or care what these kinds of greedy people will do in moments of despair as they will possess the means to arrange relief for themselves but not for someone who has died.

Even though they were responsible for the poor management of her health, the drawback is that they put all the weight on his mind that was just recovering from the traumatic experience he had endured from losing his mother.

If you think life can be worse, you should never think that in the first place.

Everything in life’s hardest moment is a trial, it will have its drawbacks and effects. But it is your perspective that will help you in overcoming the tides that are gunning to sweep you away completely.

Instead, having an optimistic view of life is always helpful in such scenarios. We can daddle on the negativities and drawbacks as much as we can. The key point is to “try” to not let it affect your mental health, and peace of mind.

“The weather is like the government, always in the wrong.”

Expectations can be harmful to our mental health. We as human beings expect many things from everything around us whether it be the weather, ourselves, our loved ones, the government, God, and vice-versa.

The government never can make a proper decision or affect the lives of people they govern. They always use subjects that affect the masses as stormy weather would affect someone’s graduation day.

We can always become disappointed if we keep expectations from the wrong kinds of people, and objects as well. Because life is spontaneous and it will not listen to what you are saying. It will push you in places, you never thought of and break you in ways you never dreamed of.

The goal is to anticipate expectations before they are fulfilled and what comes of them when we keep them. Anticipation is helpful to prepare us for what comes next. It is helpful by safeguarding our physical and mental selves, thus lessening the risk that comes from keeping them from the wrong things.

“They never talk about themselves but listen to you while you talk about yourself, and keep up an appearance of being interested in the conversation.”

I’m sure all of us have known such a person at least once in our lives, that never truly opens up about themselves always pushes to talk about our problems understanding a word we say.

Recently, I got a call from an acquaintance of mine who wanted to check up on me and told me that he will listen. I was experiencing symptoms of severe depression and still am but I am working it out by myself. I told him what had happened and the people I have lost this year.

He continued to not listen, and just usher his unsolicited advice. In the middle of the conversation, he said to me that I have a belief problem and I don’t believe in God.

Now if he had paid attention to what I was talking about, he would know to not say something so damaging that made me express an outcry of emotion.

I screamed on the phone call, “do you have any idea, how hurtful that sounds to someone who just lost the people they loved?” — I continued to express my suppressed emotions.

I didn’t abuse nor did say anything bad in the conversation. I kept on expressing because I never expected him to say such a thing, “if I didn’t believe in myself or God for that matter, I wouldn’t be alive.”

He said, “this is the reason why when you talk I don’t listen to you because you overthink things.” and he cut the call after saying this. This pissed me off, he left me in a far worse state than I was in before talking to him.

Some people will never listen or have any intention of helping you recover or have some relief. They will only be interested in showing you the appearance of being a good listener when they are in reality are a good sabotager.

My advice is that to never allow anyone to make you feel this way, and the best person who will always be there is yourself unless you have people who truly will understand what you say, and reciprocate what you feel.

There are people in this world, who know what to say and when to say it and they will find you or you will find them until then you are your primary healer, and motivator — never forget that.

“It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.”

It is in human nature to feel envious of someone being better than ourselves. You can limit the exposure through your ego, but it still exists. Some people can even push you in feeling like this. However, when it comes to people who possess lesser threatening qualities than us, we accept them on the spot.

As we are not threatened by their existence, this can easily be understood from the movie, Mean Girls or any other teenage flick there is. People tend to befriend others based on a scale they keep in their minds to retrofit other people based on their appearance and how they are.

The theory behind this is that if you can’t befriend them, you work against them as that would be hard so you join them, in the friendliest of ways possible. One of the examples from such behavior was a guy that met me during a class lecture half a decade ago.

I was talking with the professor about Moore’s Law, the teacher congratulated me, as soon he saw this. He came and sat with me and shook my hand, and became my friend. Now his behavior is basically what this quote suggests. He puts himself on a higher pedestal than other people, and if a person is lesser of an intellectual than him, he generously treats them.

But if they are let’s suppose possessing a higher social presence than him. He will see them as a rival, and not be friendly at all.

The goal is to accept everyone that comes your way equally, and not try to make a fool, or an enemy out of someone when they just don’t care about such trivial matters, and you shouldn’t either.

“I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.”

Try to choose your partners and your friends wisely. I say this because I have had experience with thousands of people belonging to many places around the world.

After such a long while, I have understood this one fact to never walk paths with someone or something that has never truly learned to pick themselves up.

There is a reason why Jerome and I both agree on this fact, is that most people who still feel troubled about waiting for someone else to pick them up, won’t necessarily pick them up even if that person comes in their life and helps them to push start a newer life.

This can be seen, nowadays in the present day youth as they are slowly decaying away from living a productive life. Your life and your time are valuable, you don’t want to throw away your precious life and time for someone who would just be wasting it all away.

Even if you are doing it as an altruist, a true altruist first receives a self-sustainable amount of possessions then they help other people. When you won’t be able to fulfill your needs, by supplementing theirs. You would be left with nothing, and they will move on to someone else in the process.

You can only change one’s nature if they want to change it themselves.

The goal is to not waste your time and your life with people, possessions, or places that are not worth it. Choose and exercise your options wisely.

“It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.”

As someone who has thousands of times, this is something that I believe is to be the case. I remember the years of middle school where I had failed a class term and thus was demoted to E-Class.

In my school E-Class was basically if you even drop a percentage below 75%, you were sent there as the last resort to keep you in school. Though I never fell below 70% as that was considered a failure.

You would be removed from the school if you fall below 70, so you can understand the dilemma of teachers when they would scream at my face as to why I got so low marks.

Our physics professor would beat us as well whoever got less than 70% percent marks in any exam, we would get battered on our buttocks, in the morning assembly.

But I wasn’t alone, there was a short line perhaps of people who would stand with me every day and get battered. We would even call puns during that period, where every guy would get hit.

Even in life’s hardest of moments I was not alone, we were not alone. We were one, in our failures, in our follies, in our sufferings — we weren’t alone.

Even though we were separated from the rest, in our failings and our failures we were one and we were brothers. In our pain, we are all the same. We all feel the crushing weight of anxiety as it crushes our heartbeat. We all feel the electrifying shockwaves of pain when we get migraines. We all feel depressed, we all lose love, we all are human beings.

I always have my shadow, my reflection, and myself with me — I am never alone and neither are you.

The point is you are not alone, I am not alone and we are in this together. I understand and can bear your pain. Always know that. In our failures, we are all one. Be Well. Peace.

Thank you for reading.

Stay Blessed and Stay Safe!