The Lesson Was Always There

The lesson was always there.

That's the strange thing about growth.

We often believe we've discovered something new when, in reality, we've simply become someone capable of seeing what was there all along.

The book didn't change.

The song didn't change.

The conversation didn't change.

We did.

It wasn't until I was several weeks into my series, A Song to Sit With, that the realization finally hit me.

The songs were never the point.

The lessons they revealed were.

Some were hidden in the lyrics.

Others had nothing to do with the song itself and everything to do with what it awakened in me.

That realization left me wondering something.

What if the lesson was there all along?

What if the lesson doesn't exist in the medium at all?

What if it exists in the relationship between the medium and who we are when we encounter it?

The older I get, the less I think growth is about adding something to ourselves and the more I think it's about uncovering what was there all along.

Every meaningful experience exists on two timelines.

The first is when it happens.

The second is when we finally understand what it meant.

Sometimes those moments are separated by seconds.

Sometimes decades.

We like to imagine that change arrives through monumental moments.

A graduation.

A wedding.

The birth of a child.

The loss of someone we love.

But I suspect we're shaped far more by the thousands of moments we never think to remember.

Every day we are introduced to thoughts, interactions, and influences outside of our person that for better or for worse change the way we see the world. Most of these we pay such little attention to that we are not even aware that it is altering how we think or feel about certain things. Yet each one leaves something behind.

A thought.

A hesitation.

A new question.

A quiet certainty.

We become someone slightly different without ever noticing the moment it happened.

I don't think we ignore these moments intentionally. We simply become so accustomed to growth happening in small increments that we stop noticing it altogether. Before we're old enough to understand the world, the world has already begun teaching us how to see it. That quiet conditioning becomes so familiar that we rarely stop to ask where our perspective came from.

This realization took me somewhere unexpected.

What if the lessons have been there all along and we are just incapable of learning them until we are the person who needs them?

Life is the Journey

Growth is what changes us.

Perspective is the lens through which we understand both.

I mentioned above that my weekly series was the catalyst for this realization but I am unsure I will ever be able to put into words how profound this was for me on a personal level. In an attempt to do just that I offer this vantage point from where I am currently sitting.

Every interaction, every single one has no less than two lessons.

Be it a conversation.

A book.

A movie.

A song

Conversations have the perspective of each member in the discussion, all with their own points, but without the same perspective each may return with a different outcome. If you are like me and revisit some of those conversations time and time again we can get new lessons each time because I am not, nor are you, the same version of yourself that you were when said conversation took place.

For books, movies, or music the creator has a lesson or message they are portraying to you as the one digesting their media. You get their lesson but you may also leave with a different one altogether because you have reached a point in your life that a different message was needed and your current perspective facilitated that lesson be learned.

Maybe that's the real gift of growth.

Not that life suddenly begins offering us better lessons.

But that, over time, we become capable of recognizing the ones that have been waiting for us all along.

Perhaps that's why we return to old books.

Old songs.

Old conversations.

Not because they're waiting to tell us something new.

But because, somewhere along the way, we became someone new enough to finally hear them.

The lesson was always there.