The School of Life

Hoping for an Easy A

I love September.

I was one of those weird kids that enjoyed school and loved going back each year. New textbooks, new school supplies - I was always excited to see what I’d be learning and what new knowledge I’d have by the end of the year.

Despite having left formal schooling 25 years ago, I still feel a nostalgic sense of possibility and new beginnings when September rolls around.

I was good at school - it gave me a place to thrive and an escape from my less than safe home life. I knew what was required to succeed and was lucky not to have any learning impediments to doing well.

It’s not surprising then that I kind of love the philosophical idea of life being a school for our souls. If you hang around spiritual or self-help groups long enough, you’ll eventually hear this concept: Earth school as it’s affectionately called.

If on the other hand you have spared yourself from living in places like Bali or Austin or Costa Rica and have no idea what I’m talking about, the idea is that we all come as souls into a body on earth with the intention to learn certain life lessons. You keep coming back until you achieve mastery, at which point, in theory, you graduate and no longer need to return here.

Like most schools there are different levels of lessons with varying degrees of difficulty.

Just like in normal school, if you’re in kindergarten you are doing really well if you don’t kill anyone or steal someone else’s toys. By college though, you really should be working on things like detachment and forgiveness. Young souls are just getting the hang of life in a body and tend to go into politics (just kidding) whereas old souls walk around as if they are somehow special just because they’ve had to repeat school so many times.

Try it. Go to a yoga festival in Austin and look someone in the eye and say, “I can tell you’re an Old Soul.” Guaranteed successful pick-up line.

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I understand the appeal of Earth School.

It’s normal for humans to try and create meaning - to want a winning philosophy to life with all its vagaries. It’s a way to achieve the illusion of control: If only we can “figure life out” then perhaps we can spare ourselves from its harder aspects. Who doesn’t love an open book test?

We can’t of course. It doesn’t work that way. I know this and yet I’m still seduced by the idea that if only I can “work harder” at life; read one more philosophy book; attend one more navel gazing weekend - then - then I will get a good grade at this life thing. Yes, I was also the kid that asked the teacher for extra credit assignments.

I am not unique in my aspiration to get a good grade at life. There is an old parable of a woman, Kisa Gotami, who brought her dead child to the Buddha begging him to bring her child back to life and thereby end her suffering. He replied that he could perform the miracle but only if she could bring him five mustard seeds from a family that had not experienced any loss or pain. Of course, despite walking from village to village and knocking on every door she was not able to complete the task because such a family does not exist. If by getting a good grade in life we mean avoiding loss, suffering, mistakes or heart ache - then we’re all getting an F.

There are so many reasons that this school of life approach isn’t helpful or healthful. Constantly grading one’s performance - trying to get an A in life does not promote a lot of self-compassion or ease. It’s also exhausting. You could easily call this the “whack a mole” philosophy of life for there will always be one more thing to be better at - one more mole to hit until you die.

Of course, if life is a school, it then begs the question who is the teacher - who is doing the grading? I recently watched Freud’s Last Session: an imagined meeting between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis to debate the existence of God. What stood out for me in the film wasn’t the resolution to this unanswerable question but rather both men’s inability despite their prodigious intellect and study to see the contradictions and hypocrisies in their own lives.

The movie speaks to the fundamental problem that the mind no matter how smart - how learned - will always be limited in its capacity to understand this mystery called life.

“Life is not a problem to be solved, it’s a mystery to be lived.” Kierkegaard

How then does one navigate this mystery? Should we just hope that like Millennials we’ll all get a trophy just for participating?

I recently saw a meme that there are only two people in life whose approval you need.

It’s not your mom or dad.

It’s not your spouse or boss or children.

It’s not even a capricious god or your Freshman Algebra teacher.

It’s your eight-year-old self and your eighty-year-old self.

It’s an interesting exercise - to ask if younger you and older you would be proud of the person you are, the choices you’ve made, the challenges you navigated and the life that you’re living.

At the end of the day, the only person we have to live with; to look in the mirror at; and that is truly able to grade our “performance” in life is ourselves.

This realization can either bring great comfort or scare the shit out of you.

I, for one, hope that we all have a teacher that gives an easy A.