Life lessons can be brutal but years later when you look back, you’ll be grateful.
Often we question life and wonder why it throws endless surprises and challenges at us.
We simply can’t choose only the particular experience we want. Life offers a mixed bag of lessons in our lives.
This post dwells on the beaten path in life’s journey as I recollect and still experience it along the way.
Experiences and life lessons may not be the same for everyone but what we experience resonates with everyone.
Contents
People Change
People change with time, status, social mobility, and personal wealth or income.
For instance, people you knew in school or worked together with years ago are not the same people anymore.
Not just the people you knew once but all of us change.
Most of your friends in school and college have disappeared from your life. You can hardly recall many of their faces and names. And they should be having the same dilemma as you do.
Some old friends drift apart because they no longer share the same interests.
With some other friends, you simply don’t meet anymore as you did years ago. At times, circumstances make it difficult to keep in touch with old friends.
Other friends separate due to a sense of betrayal and loss of trust in the old ways.
Still, there are those who stick around reminiscing about the olden days. Once in a while, you bump into each other setting off automatic friendship renewal.
Some old friends pass away from this mortal world when their time comes calling.
Now people you call friends are the people you meet often and spend time together.
Despite social media connectivity, there’s nothing like meeting your friends in person on a regular basis.
The Harsh Reality
Life equations do not last long. Due to the nature of the dynamics of life, changes occur in our relations with other people.
While everybody is pursuing their goals, the once mutual interests and shared viewpoints might no longer remain the same.
If that happens, personal differences come into the clash, and cracks are bound to show for various reasons.
New alignments and contours in relations and friendships will take different directions at varying levels.
Disparity, trust deficit, envy, and competition often decide the course of our relations with other people.
But human relations are not always dictated by selfishness. There’s goodness and a compassionate nature about humans as rational beings.
It’s not that others don’t care but when everybody is tied down in their hectic lives, their own priorities come first.
Sometimes, you’ll not want to bother anybody for help. Either your loved ones and friends get tired of coming to your rescue or you hesitate to send out a distress call…every time.
You’ll have to chart your own path out of the treachery maze.
When you’re struggling in life, negative chain reactions tend to charge at you and pile up one after the other until the life storms pass.
Quest for the Unknown
In your quest for success, wealth, and power you get curious about the intricacies of the subconscious mind and the higher power.
The idea of mind power and the secret to success held within the subconscious mind triggers your interest to explore the road less traveled.
There comes a time when you feel like exhausting all your hard work and you turn to innate powers for enlightenment.
With your fascination to tap into mind power, you consume a great deal of information about the infinite mind to assist you in your pursuit of success.
The realm of deeper spiritualism and its benefits appeal to you more than ever as you struggle and hanker for success.
To Stay Relevant, Keep Reinventing Yourself
You’ll realize that you cannot keep relying on your past success stories.
People will compliment you on your past achievements but the present moment of who you are is equally important.
Staying relevant applies in all situations. In public life, the business world, or any sphere in your profession, you have to invest in your personal and professional growth and development to stay relevant.
You’ll understand that to stay relevant, you need to self-motivate and push yourself to do better in your life and the work that you do.
You need to compete against your previous record to achieve better results. Give yourself an honest self-progress report.
Assess your performance regularly and identify your weaknesses and strengths. If old methods don’t work anymore, adopt different strategies and approaches to your work.
Change and adapt will be your guiding principles if you want to stay relevant. “Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson serves as a motivational analogy in our daily practical lives.
The truth is that we cannot count solely on past laurels. We have to adapt to changing realities.
Successful people update their knowledge and hone their skills regularly to stay informed with evolving times.
Only Hard Work Pays
You cannot expect to find a treasure trove like in fiction or movies. You have to work really hard to create your wealth.
Gone were the days you led a spirited life in your early school days. Your parents took care of your requirements.
But those days of freebies are soon over. As you slowly stepped into adulthood, you begin to understand the many facets of life.
You begin to see the world from different perspectives that you didn’t imagine or cared about.
In life’s journey, you have to clear the thorns from your path with each step you take. You’ll get familiar with many doors slammed in your face.
Opportunities abound but they are hard to come by. You learn that you have to adapt to situations to survive wherever you go.
Unless you sweat from your brows, success will remain a distant dream.
Life Karma
“As you sow, so shall you reap” is a hard reminder for the Ages to come. And then we have what goes around always comes around or a ‘Karma‘ in life.
In my experience, it’s not easy to do something good. But to indulge in bad things, that’s very easy.
Even when I tried a new language skill with friends, it’s funny how the first few vocabularies I picked up were only swearing words.
What you do intentionally, whether for good or ill intentions always comes back to you.
To be on the side of caution, the focus here is on the consequences of life.
For instance, if you take away something that you knew someone else deserved, someday when you least expect it, life will reward you on the same platter if not the bigger one.
In the course of a frantic rush and stiff competition, we barely bother to contemplate our words and actions.
Life hands out wages in different packages according to our conduct and actions.
So there, your karma depends on what you did and what you consider doing now and in the future.
You can’t escape the harsh truth. Life has its own way of teaching us lessons. You’ll know that it makes your life easier to learn from people who had been there before.
The only problem is that we refuse to learn from good old advice until we experience it.
Love and Marriage Institution
Your concept of marriage institution undergoes a paradigm shift. If you ever dreamed of perfect love and marriage, you’ll be in for a surprise by the reality.
If you’re lucky or unlucky to get married, you’ll experience the most intense relationship with your spouse in terms of love and hate. Both go together when you decide to stay married.
When you love and feel loved, you feel the most secure person. And when you hate and get hated, you taste the bitter experience.
Somehow, for many people, marriage life endures. And that’s great.
Love alone does not hold marriage intact. A concoction of money, children, career, and even relatives and friends can make or dent your marriage.
Fidelity or infidelity is a by-product of these mixtures. Building and nurturing a marriage is teamwork.
Social and Professional Ladder
Your integrity and character are important attributes that will speak of your social standing in society.
You’ll realize that the measure of your success also depends on the support of other people.
Your skills and hard work determine your success at the initial stage but after you establish your career, you cannot solely depend on your skills alone.
Your career growth or stagnation depends on your network and establishing rapport with your coworkers or ignoring them in your organization.
A healthy relationship with your colleagues and your boss plays a major role to thrive in your career.
Likewise, having a social circle of like-minded productive people can enhance your career advancement.
People are ready to recognize your skills and contributions only if you have good working relations with them.
Equally, others also need your reciprocal gestures and support in their career progression. Mutual support and help in times of need will benefit everyone.
It’s in your best interest to work and consider the welfare of everyone in the organization.
Interests, Hobbies, and Goalposts Shift with Age
Your childhood idea of becoming emperor of the world no longer holds water by the time you hit your twenties.
Children’s story books and comics give way to more serious books and newspapers. Now you hardly get time to hang around with friends.
You’ll know that political circumstances and the socio-economic environment where you live will impact your goals despite your varied ambitions.
As you experience numerous life challenges, you’ll come to terms with reality and choose to take the path that you consider achievable and where your interest lies.
Many will settle for tried and tested approach to life, while only a few will venture into the unknown paths.
Others will still crisscross trying to find their true calling and what they really want in life.
Finally, arriving at the crossroads, whichever path you take will determine your future, and spend most of your time engaging in that reality.
Tuning into Life Philosophy
Your taste in music gravitates toward meaningful and soulful lyrics that talk about life, beauty, honor, sacrifice, and love.
You’ll begin to appreciate nature’s beauty, peaceful environment, and orderly life. Values and ethics become more relevant to you.
Gradually you’ll get to know your true self – Your dreams, aspirations, limitations, strengths, and what you can and cannot change about yourself.
You begin to have better control over your emotional intelligence.
What you couldn’t do in your youth, you now found it much easier to discard your old non-productive habits.
You’ll begin to engage in self-reflection as a new habit that monitors your thought process and outward actions.
Your serious thoughts will delve into creations, the universe, and higher power. Your wild dreams when you were young become irrelevant.
Savings and investments become your priority. You begin to appreciate the idea of frugality and minimalism.
You’ll begin to keep a watch on the costs of living – fuel, gas, food prices, children’s education, and their future.
Considering your age and responsibility, you’ll begin to have more self-discipline than when you were young.
You become concerned about the continuity of traditions and culture as you reminisce about your days different from the present generation.
You turn more pragmatic and readily connect with realities through the accumulation of your experiences.
At times, your thoughts revolve around the fascination of planning for retirement.
A Time Comes to Embrace that Old is Gold
Someday you’ll find that wrinkles have appeared on your face, a balding head or sprouting grey hairs proudly dance on your head in the wind.
You might look and feel younger but looking at your contemporaries confirms your real age anyway.
People you called aunt and uncle have withered away slowly and you start to take their place.
You’ll want to retain your youthfulness. But you can’t help frowning at others for trying to look young.
Accept your age gracefully as you gain more life lessons along the way. An important aging substance is that Old is Gold.
Now there’s a silver lining in aging. Age is just a number if you think from a practical aspect.
Age is just a Number
There’s still a sunny side to life…
Look at people who are still going strong as they age. The fact is that they have acquired the experiences that only maturity offers.
It’s not just about a few people defying age but a growing tribe of people advanced in age still kicking around and having loads of fun.
If you think that people in their forties and beyond have already spent their life, it’s good to know that serious fun life starts in the 40s.
You’ll discover amazing things about living in your later years. Age should not be a factor when you think about what you can get out of life.
As you grow older, you’ll slowly understand the wisdom of what elders and sages said or say. You’ll appreciate so many things at a deeper level you didn’t know about.
In a way, real life starts when you understand yourself and start living your life the way you want it. With a smile, you’ll begin to unravel all those proverbs and popular sayings spoken Ages ago.
Life Lessons in a Nutshell
Embrace life experiences as priceless gifts you receive from life in everyday situations.
Be grateful for all the lessons you learn as you explore and discover new things in life’s journey.
In life, nobody is a loser or a winner. It’s just that we need to know how to make use of the lessons we learn in life.