What if there isn't a lesson?

I've been thinking about this because we seem determined to make everything thathappens to us mean something.

The terrible relationship taught me what I deserved.

The job I hated taught me resilience.

The friendship that imploded taught me boundaries.

The loss made me stronger.

The difficult childhood made me who I am.

Maybe.

But also... maybe sometimes shit just goes sideways.

Maybe you trusted someone you shouldn't have. Maybe something ended badly.

Maybe you made a spectacularly poor decision. Maybe someone behaved terribly

towards you.

And perhaps there isn't a neat little lesson waiting at the end of it with a bow around

it.

I'm increasingly suspicious of our need to turn pain into personal development.

Especially because, and I think we need to admit this, not everybody grows.

Some people have the same experience seventeen times and learn absolutely

nothing.

Some people get older without becoming wiser.

Some people remain gloriously committed to being exactly the same a-hole they

were twenty years ago.

Apparently, transformation is optional.

Though to be fair, those people aren't short of lessons. They're just declining them.

Which brings me to the other kind: the lessons that are right there in front of us.

We see the pattern. We ask the same question in a dozen different ways. We circle it,

analyse it, explain it, find another angle and then another.

Sometimes, I think, we aren't actually looking for an answer.

We're looking for an answer we can live with.

Because knowing something and being ready to accept what that knowledge requires

of us are two completely different things.

And that's where I've landed on something else:

You cannot drag another person towards an insight they're not ready to have.

You can ask the question.

You can hold up the mirror.

You can even, occasionally, say the uncomfortable thing out loud.

But at some point, you have to put the mirror down.

Their life. Their pattern. Their consequences.

You can leave the light on.

You don't have to stand there holding the bloody torch.

(Yes, I'm aware I've just turned this into a lesson. Old habits.)

So, not everything is a lesson.

And even when it is, we're under no obligation to learn it.

A lesson isn't the same thing as meaning, either. You can let something matter, carry

it, honour it, be changed by it, without it having taught you a single thing.

Sometimes shit happens. Sometimes we grow from it. Sometimes we repeat it.

Sometimes we spend twenty years avoiding what we already know.

And sometimes, if you ask me what the great lesson was, my answer will genuinely

be:

Honestly? No idea.

It happened.

I got through it.

Life carried on.