Life Lessons from Words and the World

Hang onto your hats folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride! (Lesson #1)

So day 23 and we are sharing things we've learned that school won't teach you.  First off, whoa, loaded topic!  Books, cleverness? Yes, school is meant to teach you those things.  But as Hermione taught me, there are more important things.  However, I feel if I looked closely enough with adult eyes at all the things school can teach you outside of books the list would be quite long. There is a lot of life that goes on within a school campus but my young mind was not mature enough to grasp everything I could  have learned from it. Life is the best teacher and that can be done outside school grounds just as much as in them.  School may be able to teach you some about life, but I don't think it prepares you enough for it.  Especially considering that degree I worked so hard for, I only used about two years and doubt I will use again.

A lot of my life lessons I have learned along the way and many of the have been learned the hard way. I have learned a lot from words.  Or at least they have summed up what I learned and were put into words by someone else that said what I learned better than I could.  So that is where I will start.

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn." C.S. Lewis
My experiences have taught me the most. And sometimes they are hardest lessons to learn. They have shaped me and empowered me and will continue to do so, I am sure, until the day I die. In school a lot of my experiences were controlled in a setting where my mistakes couldn't really hurt me that badly.  They don't teach you that the outside world doesn't really work that way.

"I realize that life is risks.  It's acknowledging the past but looking forward.  It's taking a chance that we will make mistakes but believing that we all deserve to be forgiven." Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Our past is a part of us, just as much as our experiences. The risks we take, the chances, they all lead us down one road over another.  We may have to take a u-turn and try again but I believe that I am forgiven.  Even if it only means I have forgiven myself.

"It's never been a perfect world.  It's never going to be. It's going to be hard, and scary and, if you're lucky, wonderful and awe-inspiring.  But you have to push through the bad parts to get to the good." Carrie Ryan, The Dark and Hollow Places
Oh, that perfect world! The one they make you believe is waiting for you once you finish all the schooling they have been force feeding you.  I think this was one of the toughest lessons I have learned.  Life isn't perfect. It is not this immaculate, beautiful fairy tale that they read to you from stories. Life is what you make of it.  There are bad moments; those shall pass.  There are great moments; those will most likely pass too.  The good moments, the content ones?! My hope looking forward is that I see the most of them and find a steadiness in them that continues to make this imperfect world seem just a little brighter.

Life is messy.  It is blessed.  It is human.  We are all imperfect people and we all live in a broken and imperfect place, but there is greatness here.  There is love and beauty and happiness. We can strive for it daily and sometimes we will fail but we go on another day and we embrace it.  Because the messy moments make the pretty ones more beautiful and the beautiful ones give us something to hope for when we are weeding through the mess.