The real lessons in life are seldom the ones we want

When we learn the lessons in life that we think we need to learn, we generally learn nothing at all. The real lessons we need to learn are the lessons that life has in store for us. You know when you’re due for your next lesson: it’s when you’re resisting some or other change. You find yourself stuck, defending your position, trying with all your might to hold on and control what should happen next.

When you’re driving a car, the sooner you react to a sudden change in circumstances, the less likely you are to crash. When you’re slow to react – because you’ve been driving too fast, had your attention elsewhere, or the obstacle has arisen suddenly – then there’s a chance that once you react, your car will go into a slide. In a real slide, the correct thing to do is to point the front wheels in the direction you want to go, and keep your foot off the brake. And wait. It’s when you touch your foot on the brake that you’re likely to spin and roll. There’s nothing else you can do, but wait until it’s all over, then check for damage, and deal with the fallout.

Change is truly exciting if you have an attitude of faith and trust

In life, when you’re in a state of flux, it’s a situation with many variables that you can do nothing about. Instead of trying to control everything, keep your mind fixed on where you want to go; give up trying to control or stop the things you cannot control (like what he or she thinks or feels), and wait. See what’s left when it stops, then pick up the pieces.

When we emerge from the wreckage of change we have the lesson that life wants us to learn. It’s seldom the lesson we wanted to learn and that’s why it took a crash to get us to learn it. Some of the greatest inventions and discoveries happened quite by accident. We can never predict what beauty or genius comes out of a new set of variables that follows change. Change is truly exciting if we have an attitude of faith and trust. Do you trust life, or only yourself? If only yourself, then please make more trees grow, and stop global warming while you’re at it!

Being uncertain is the launching pad for personal power

If there’s anything you’re certain about, anything you’re 100% sure that that’s the way life is, that’s the way God made us, then you can be certain about one thing more: that you’re fooling yourself. What you take as the absolute truth is simply the current  limit of your world, of what you believe is possible. It’s your ‘flat earth’ statement, and you just haven’t sailed beyond the limits yet to test it.

Ne plus ultra is a Latin term that means ‘not further beyond’. It referred to the point beyond which sailors would not sail their ships for fear of being swallowed by monsters or falling off the edge of the earth. We each have a ne plus ultra in our minds, the point in our beliefs beyond which we’re not willing to go.

When you go beyond that point, you’re
left with nothing but pure possibility

Going beyond our ne plus ultra is the scariest thing. Beyond it lies nothing but pure possibility. When you give up certainty, you’re left with only you; you realise that you don’t run the universe and you don’t define God, and that’s pretty humbling for most of us. It’s also the launch pad for personal power, because you start facing the problems as they are – or rather, the problem as it is, the problem of you – instead of the problem being ‘out there’ somewhere. Just as the limit for sailors was never the earth, it was always what they held to be certain in their minds.

Being uncertain about the things you’re certain about will start to dissolve your limitations.