Relearning

The new literacy?  Maybe in a ‘retraining for a new vocation’ sense, but to ‘learn, unlearn, and relearn’ are actually personal survival skills developed over the years as one faces every new dawn while striving to see the sun peacefully setting at that same day’s end.

We all know that life is tough for those not sheltered from its harshness.  For everyone actively pursuing their own dreams and ambitions there will be both good days and bad ones, including the knowledge that what works well for you one day may not work so well a week from now because in reality that’s just how it is—the only true certainty in LIFE is change.

For some folks just when you think you’ve got the hang of living—finally got that ‘living thing’ all mapped out and you are feeling relaxed and comfortable with your labors, something or someone will throw a stone into your efficiently-turning “my life” cog and derail the entire gear while twisting the gear-bearing shaft in the process, so that your once smooth-flowing operation never quite works the same way again.

When that ‘cog glitch’ happens to you your entire LIFE mechanism is now broken and unfortunately nothing short of a complete machinery overhaul will get it functioning properly again.

So in effect what you had once learned as the KEY component or attribute to successfully living your life (your charm, your intelligence, your looks, your inventiveness, your intuitive guesses, even your unwavering work ethic), now lies broken on the cement step of your home’s threshold awaiting your entrance, and suddenly you can no longer unlock that same familiar door to reach the inner sanctity of your personal domain—it’s like being locked out of your own house with a “Foreclosure” sign staring you in the face and feeling clueless as to how it happened.  What once worked so easily for you, now no longer does; and those who once supported you, now turn their backs when you arrive.

This means that your life has drastically and horrifically changed in some unexpected way that requires YOU in turn to change to meet the NEW challenges that you now must face.  The emotional/psychological effect of such sudden change can be devastating to anyone. It can literally break you unless you toughen up quickly to the new standard now required for you to simply survive, let alone thrive, under its deconstructing pressure.

But in time you learn that if what you once did no longer works for you, then you must now unlearn what had become your second nature—those ‘slipped into’ auto-pilot behaviors once used to live your life. You must unlearn the habits of your previous day-to-day existence because they simply no longer apply to this new situation and this vastly different operating environment.

Suddenly you must UNLEARN all your previous habits and beliefs that have brought you to this momentous change point, and RELEARN how to start life again in some new way because there is no other choice among your current life options.

Your final recognition of the necessity of this restart moment affects you like a ‘shakeup to your internal makeup’—meaning you either rebirth yourself in some productive manner to start a new and different way of living, or you self-destruct into oblivion along with the remnants of your old life—remonstrating in self-pity to any audience along the way.

When you can finally get your head around the severity of your current condition, you are then forced to ask yourself this question: Do I want to remain as a stinking, smoldering ash pit in the memory of what my life once was, or do I want to rise like the fabled phoenix slowly lifting itself from the lapping, searing, all-consuming flames—rising slowly out of the smoky haze as you pull yourself from these old-life ashes until you can fly free once again?

That decisive moment when you define your true intent becomes an inflection point—a direction change: To either die ingloriously here in the ruins of where you once learned to be, or to rise freshly reborn into an entirely new way of being—which means developing new habits, new living patterns, and maintaining a new perspective on your reconstruction endeavor.

But while you are still hunkered down in the ash pit you must face the true decision to go one direction or the other, because you can no longer be the same person that you were the day before the situational change; when the earth suddenly shifted under your feet forcing you to no longer follow the same path as before or even to walk in the same manner that you once did.  While you may prefer the old way of living and being, you simply can’t do that now because that life is no longer an option for you.

So your only other choice available is to unlearn what you once knew that had worked so well for you, and then relearn what now might work for you since the world took such a drastic turn away from what had once been your comfort level and certainty.

You must relearn how to live your life.  And relearn how to shift your perspective on everything and everyone around you, including to relearn how you view yourself as a loving and compassionate human being; and most importantly, you must relearn the true value of your own self—you must relearn how to believe in yourself again.

Quite simply: You must RELEARN how to live your LIFE, and maybe even relearn what LIFE means to you now that your perspective has so drastically shifted by those life challenges.

It might not seem easy to think of in this manner, but relearning is actually a natural evolutionary process across all species.

Relearning is what we do every day. We daily input, assess, and react to the world around us, and when that input changes, then we adjust our internal assessments and gauge our reactions accordingly. It’s just that normally our input changes are fairly minor or of minimal consequence to our lives; but when those inputs are seismic and possibly life shattering (major losses like deaths, divorces, illnesses or injuries, job elimination, relationship endings, etc.) that’s when our minds can’t register how to assess them properly and that throws us into mental chaos—that’s when that randomly tossed pebble breaks a cognitive gear-cog and our lives seem to uncontrollably wobble or to even spin out of control because we can’t quickly determine how we actually arrived at this ‘ash-pit point’ where most of our efforts now involve fighting off the overwhelming smoke threatening to suffocate us.

As dire as it may now seem, keep in mind that this happens to everyone at some point in their life—just in different ways. It may be hard. It will truly suck—no doubt about it. But it still happens; and you have to move through it as carefully as you can, and then move beyond it in time. This is how we grow in consciousness. We move beyond the challenges we must face.

So as disconcerting as this might sound, don’t fear relearning.  We all have to do it. You are not alone in your struggles.

To survive the worst of the worst in your life, you quickly learn to spray your wings with fire retardant before the flames engulf you, and eventually when the challenge lessens in intensity, you will learn to first strengthen your resolve to survive, and then rise again from the ashes of what you once were. 

Remember: Smoldering ash pits are everywhere around us, and phoenixes are the only true survivors of this world with its perpetual challenges.

Now your main NEW goal is to become a phoenix.