Sometimes the lessons are in the lessons.

There is no escaping the obvious. I am a hot mess.

For those of you who regularly read my blog posts, you must feel like you’ve been watching a train wreck in slow motion. Just about the time I follow the crumbs and think I have something in life figured out, even before I can do a celebratory Snoopy dance, invariably I realize I either totally missed the point or understood only part of the experience at hand.

For me, there are no easy answers; it comes down to trial and error.

I was thinking about my learning style, which at times feels more like a contact sport, as I was reading Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream by William Powers. In the book, Powers attempts to reconcile his life experiences and values with his current life situation. Struggling to find his life’s throughline, he finally realizes that sometimes the lessons are in the lessons. A Eureka! moment for us both.

A vision of Russian Matryoshka (nesting) dolls—a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another—immediately came to mind. One fits neatly and carefully inside the other.

Sometimes the lessons are in the lessons.

In my experience, faced with disparate lessons and experiences, rather than trying to unpack them neatly and carefully, I just forcibly jam them together. I waste copious amounts of time and energy trying to make them fit, trying to see the bigger picture, trying to get to the root of the teaching moment. In retrospect, the only thing my mash-up efforts seem to accomplish is to obscure the obvious by creating something that was never there to begin with. No wonder life feels like a contact sport!

I was just too literal. Not everything fits. Not everything is supposed to fit. Not everything is the lesson unto itself.

Sometimes the lessons are in the lessons.

—Robin

Photo ©2011 J. Ronald Lee, CC Attribution 3.0.