We
might skip some lessons at school, but we can't skip any of the lessons of life.
They will find us.
If a lesson is up for us and we don't learn it now, then it's programmed into the universe that we will just have to learn it later. But by mid-life, we're destined to learn. Whatever parts of you are blocking the emergence of the highest, best you, have simply got to go now. And one way or the other, they will.
Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you. It can deliver you to an entrenched despair, or deliver you to your higher self. At mid-life we decide, consciously or unconsciously, the path of the victim or the path of the phoenix when it is rising up at last.
Growth can be hard, and labouring a new self very difficult. Growing older just happens; growing wise is something else again. And by a certain point in life, most of us have been hurt. We have been disappointed. We have had dreams die, and find it hard to forgive ourselves or others.
The challenge of age is not to skip life's disappointments but to transcend them. We transcend them by learning the lessons they taught us, however painful, and coming out on the other side prepared.
