The day one enters the cycle of birth and death and takes the first breath into this enormous beautiful world, from that very moment ones learning and lessons start.and, it is not some other being who teaches the lessons of life. It is ones own soul and ones own conscious and experiences which becomes the teacher at every step of life. This is what “universities of life” refers to, it is basically the school from where we inculcate the teachings, and the school is our own conscious. Coming back to the beginning of our life, when we enter this world with drops of tears in our eyes, from that very day we are ready to learn something or the other. It could be good or bad, harmful or useful, but the process of learning goes on and on. As stated earlier, that we come with tears in our eyes, which reflects that “Man knows how to cry from birth, but laughter needs some learning”. Some virtues are already present in humans from birth and for some virtues we take almost whole of our life to learn.learning, is the part of life, and till the very end we are into the process of learning. As very well said by Eartha Kitt, “we are learning all the times and our tombstone will be our diploma.”
If we carefully pay attention to the things around us, we will get something to learn. We can learn so much from this nature, from insects, from the sun, from the earth, from non living things, from a small infant, from a spider knitting his web, and even from that tiny little ant that always wait for a second to meet another ant on the way, even when they all seem to be so busy. We can learn from each and every thing present in this world, it’s just that we should have keen interest for that.
One day, you suddenly understand something you understood all your life, but in a new way. This is called learning. It is understanding, all those facts which were known to us, in a new way, or we can say with all new prospects.usually,we learn from the mistakes we commit and the risks we take in life. Each and every mistake teaches us something and leaves a mark on our hearts and brains. And “the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing”. Hence, the mistake which teaches us something is not really called a mistake, it gets converted into experience. And all genuine knowledge originates from direct experience that is our own conscious which is rightly quoted by Carl Rogers- “the only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self discovered or self appropriated learning”
God gives us innumerable opportunities to learn from ourselves and our life, thus he himself has made us “UNIVERSITY OF LIFE”, so that we learn from our actions, our behavior, our conscious, and our experiences, besides learning from all the wonderful things present on this globe. “God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us the lessons we could not learn in any other way.”
Most of us miss out life’s big prizes that is The Nobel, The Olympics, The Oscars etc.but we are eligible to learn from life’s small pleasures that is A pat on the back, a full moon , an empty parking space , a crackling fire , a great meal , a glorious sunset , hot soup , cold beer , don’t fret about getting life’s grand rewards. Enjoy its tiny teachings. There are plenty for all of us!
SONALI MEHTA
