I’ve heard that the lesson to be learned to anything is at the end. Hmm. The end of what exactly? The end of the day, the week, the event, the story….? Is the lesson a stand alone lesson, or is it contingent upon previous lessons? Would I take the same thing away as someone else or does that only happen when when we are told exactly what we should learn, like in a fable? We’re all sort of living in our own fable. We tell each other stories about how we overcame this or that. How we applied a formula (that we often made up on the fly) to conquer a fear that had some kind of grip on us. ‘Listen to me, this may help you’ is the way we communicate to others.
Me, I’m stubborn. It’s usually difficult for me to take input from others about how ‘overcome’ something, but I’m learning how to allow that. I think I mostly want to find things out on my own because that’s the fun part. Sure, there are short cuts to learning and everything beyond knowing the basics is just a way to become more efficient (or is it effective) for doing things. I know I will never become the best in the world at anything because of my steep learning curves and I’m perfectly fine with that. Because being the best is never the goal. Being MY best, however…. I would like to improve beyond my current limitations, just like anyone else I hallucinate. But a heel strike or not being completely aerodynamic on the bike or breathing too heavily while swimming, may or may not be the lessons of racing an Ironman. Those things certainly do apply, however.
The moral of the story, for this day at least, is ‘do things you like to do just because you like to do them’. Maybe this is the ultimate lesson, but we won’t know if that is the case until….. the end I guess.