Higher Education or Let me Learn That Lesson in the Next Lifetime, Please

WARNING:  Expect no laughs, giggles,snorts or funny stuff all ye who enter here today.  This is that boring  
 Lo who insists on gnawing on a puzzle until the poor thing is unrecognizable. Sorry about that.  

I have recently been wrestling with a few of life's conundrums and suddenly came upon a truth I had never glimpsed before......and I am not sure at all that I like it.  This is very different from other truths that I have stumbled upon whereby I feel enlightenment, release, ecstasy (and gratitude that I can stop wrestling with that particular lesson from now on).  For this reason I intend to brood upon it for a while and will not discuss it further right now.  (Stop that booing and hurling of overripe fruit in my direction this very minute......I will tell you if and when I am good and ready.)

However, it made me think about this whole business of Life Lessons and how mightily we all struggle not to learn them, and how sometimes our subconscious or our wiser self gives us a smack in the head in our dreams if we could only understand them. 
 
The wonderful  Mary Moon of  Blessourhearts and I share a lot of things including those weird dreams about  being in college and forgetting to go to our classes.   Some time back Ms. Moon blogged about a puzzling dream she had..


............."But the one that woke me up this morning was bad enough. I'd applied to law school and gotten accepted and then of course I had no idea where classes met or when or anything and besides that, I kept saying, "I don't want to be a lawyer!" and so I stayed at the Opera House and was trying to do some Herculean task straightening up and organizing the costume and prop room so that the law school could put their books in that room, feeling guilty all the while because I wasn't ever going to make anything of
myself. "


My own dream is similar and I have dreamed it many, many times in my life.  I don't know what led up to the dream moment, but wherever I am I suddenly realize that I am in college,  it is the end of the semester and there is a class I had signed up  for but never attended and, worse yet,  the final was today.

Horrors!  Not only would I flunk the exam and the course, but I had missed/avoided the chance to learn that lesson........(have no idea what the subject was).  The punishment for this was never very clear but I knew it was dire and would affect my entire life.  I would be plunged into a pit of guilt, remorse, shame and black depression.  Then always I would awake still writhing in agony and ask myself, "What the hell was that all about?".                                                                                                                        


It is only recently that I have come up with some kind of answer.....I think that this is all related to my conviction that life is a kind of school  and we are here to learn certain life lessons   (while we are doing what WE think we are here for) ....but sometimes we aren't really ready to learn that lesson or perhaps are too cowardly to attempt it at this moment ....it is too painful an idea to accept.... too difficult to even face the truth that is flickering before our eyes so we shut them tight,  turn our backs and slink back down the way we came without enduring the confrontation and without learning anything except that we have escaped (growing) and that cowardice has prevailed again.    We get many chances to learn the same lesson and often turn away without learning it.
                                                                                                                            


Perhaps in the next life we will get another chance to try and we will succeed***........Meanwhile we go on avoiding it desperately enduring that excruciating drawing up of all our resources against....of suffering that tensing of all our muscles , the squeezing, straining, twisting and painful pinching of our guts and entrails, the clutching at door jambs with clenched fingers and bloody, torn fingernails .....all the ways we resist opening our eyes and exposing ourselves to the lesson.  In my own case I have found that it is only when the process of resisting becomes so excruciating and exhausting that I cannot continue that good things happen.  When I have to surrender.......to stop resisting the letting go of a wrong idea or an unacceptable truth about myself...........when I go limp and can no longer fight and must accept death from the truth, that is when I can finally see things from a different viewpoint.  Then finally comes not death but the moment of epiphany and triumph.   One beautiful "Aha"......one  delicious orgasmic moment and then........sob.....on to gather strength for the next lesson grateful I do not have to drag that particular bag of crap along any longer.

For me it always boils down to the same precious old keywords..........."Accept" and "Let go".

Sigh.


Sounds so simple....

If only it weren't so damned hard........

***I do believe we get to go around again....can't accept that God would let all the effort we put into learning what we have managed to learn go to waste.