Lessons are never over

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In my original blog series of 39 lessons I learned before I turned 40, one of the lessons I highlighted was that the more I know, the less I know. I came to this discovery early in the process of reflecting on my lessons, and it made me aware of how expanding my knowledge base highlighted for me how little I truly knew, and it seemed that growing in knowledge also made me feel like I knew less and less. This is a slightly different lesson, one that I am now realizing a couple of years down the path of reflecting on my life lessons, and it is simply - just because I learned a lesson, doesn’t mean I’ve “arrived” - there is always more to learn even within that same lesson.

This one is harder for me to admit to, and it began to come to light after I wrote and published my book last year. Recently, I was on a radio interview, where the host asked me if the fact that I was writing about my journey to leading an authentic life meant that 1. I wasn’t doing so before and 2. That now I have fully stepped into it and embraced it that everything I do is authentic. I can’t remember the answer I gave, mostly because the question surprised me - I hadn’t considered that particular view. For me, it made me realize that writing about it in that way might give a reader the impression that the journey was over, and now I have arrived, learned my lessons and am officially kicking ass and taking names. The truth however is far away from that. Some days, I realize that I have learned a lesson in one part of my life, and I now need to learn it in another. In this way, learning the lesson has brought an awareness to me that this is a blind spot I have, and I need to consider - where else do I have this blind spot? Again using the book as an example, after I wrote it and was promoting it, I had a hard time being true to myself and my values during the marketing process. The very lessons that I learned in life about considering what I valued, what was important to me, and how I could use this to guide my actions did not make it into the social media posts I had scheduled three months in advance, as I attempted to follow the “book promotion” templates laid out by other people. This isn’t to minimize learning from the expertise of others, but simply the realization that I still needed to be true to my own values and use those as the lens for learning from others. The result is that even before I published, I felt burned out and irritated and never wanted to talk about the book again, because I was only doing it on other people’s terms. And writing a book is hard - because the truth is that it is there for the reader, and it is a balance between what is important to me as the writer but I can’t forget the reader in all of this. The lesson learned for me in this was that I needed to find a way to be true to myself while taking the reader into consideration, and holding those two things was hard for me. It made me realize that even after writing an entire book about it, I still had a lot to learn about living a truly authentic life. 

I have also seen this in other parts of my life. I wrote a lot about my spiritual journey in various stages of my blogging, but I have also learned very recently through my writing that I had only scratched the surface, and this is changing all the time. Even the very first lesson I wrote on the beauty of imperfection - one that I learned many years ago as a perfectionist baker - still returns to me constantly, with every new venture I undertake (and still occasionally when I am baking!) So while what I wrote in that original post is true (and there is an excerpt below), this lesson has become much deeper for me as the decade has progressed. 

One theme that I found repeated, especially over the last decade, is that ironies have been a big part of the journey of 39 lessons. The latest one is looking at how I realized that as I grow in knowledge, I grow in ignorance. It seems as if the more I know, the less I know!! It has been a strange one to come to grips with. My teens and twenties was definitely a time where there were a lot of definitive and black and whites. No excuses. No regrets. I made decisions, I executed them, and I lived with the consequences. I was so sure of everything and I was all about cold hard facts.

Due to a series of unfortunate events, these facts began to crumble one by one. I questioned everything. And instead of my answers being more certainties, I started to see not just black and white, not even shades of grey, but suddenly the world erupted into a swirl of vibrant colours. Some of them were really bright, like the yellow of the sun which hurt my eyes, and some of them were yucky and disgusting greens, and some of them were beautiful stunning oranges and blues (like my favourite sunset, or the ocean on a cloudless day). Sounds good huh? Well I guess it was and it wasn’t. When the world is black and white, it is kind of easy to make decisions. And when your knowledge is limited, your choices are few. It is like when people say - ignorance is bliss. But once the colours break out then that is a whole 'nother story. I suppose it is like the difference between drawing in pencil, and using a palate of oil paints (something I did quite recently). Now I have all of these options, and which one do I use first, and in what order? Shall I mix them? How do I get just the shade of blue I want? Do I add white? Or black? Or red? The list goes on and on. Now that things aren’t certain, I realized that there is a world of information out there, and the more of it I learn, the more I realize how much more there is to know! Every time I open my mind to one possibility, I realize that there are 10 more out there, or a hundred or more! And I also realized the truth of something called metamerism (fancy word I learned in Dental school) which refers to colours which look the same in one light but which appear different in another light or from another angle (rough definition). The same is true in life – things look different depending on what angle you look at them from or the light you are using to shine on them.

So after all of this rambling – what is my lesson? Well the first part of it was how I started this – the more I know the less I know. I had to get used to the fact that there was much out there that I didn’t know about, and to open my mind to new information, and for it to come from unexpected places. The more I learn, the more I know I need to learn, and I stay open to that; I listen without judgement. The second part is – not to let the information overwhelm me into indecision. We have a saying here – too much choice dilemma (often rolled into one word toomuchchoicedilemma – could do with a hashtag but I digress). This is an indication that once there are too many choices, it can actually cause more problems than it solves, and I need to find a screening process which allows me to make better decisions. 

… the third part of the lesson. It is still fine for me to have black and whites. I still have my values, and it is perfectly acceptable to hear information, process it, and reject it as a part of my personal values. It doesn’t mean I reject the person saying it (although I might) it simply means that it is ok for me not to embrace that bit of information.

And lastly the fourth part, and to that lovely word metamerism – I need to make an effort to guide the light I shine on information. Since things look different depending on the light or angle, I need to choose the angle which I use to look at these colours. A person’s reality is heavily influenced by the opinion they form of what happens, and I need to ensure that the light I use allows any knowledge or experience I have to be useful and positive in my experience and growth.

You can find the entire post here. As for me, I continue to learn, to make mistakes, and to sometimes make the same mistake over and over, and learn the lesson in various areas of my life. Learning this lesson means that I understand that even after I think I have learned something (and written a blog post about it), that can be the beginning of learning, the start of the awareness, and I often have to remind myself that there is no such thing as “arriving”. In reality, the journey has only just begun, and the lesson is - I am still learning lessons - even the ones I thought that I had already learned. 

What lessons have you had to learn more than once? Let me know in the comments.

I send you big love from a small island.

PS I recently made some mini lemon meringues (on a rainy day here in Barbados), and that very first lesson about climate and baking came back to me with a jolt. They may look cute but they did NOT travel well. I won’t traumatize you with the after photos.