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Life Long Learners Get Life Lesson Whether They Learn Or Not

life lesson

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Life Lessons start early for writers, then they spend years figuring it out enough to make a joke, a poem, a short story, novella, novel. Maybe more, like a groundbreaking memoir.
If it’s worth learning, it’s worth writing about to drill it in.
Like most children of my generation, baby boomers, I had it made in the shade, living on easy street and never having to move anywhere but up.
At least that’s what the ingrates who call themselves millennials default to. Our upbringing wasn’t easy street.

I nearly had my big toe cut off when I stood on the back of a trike pushing the rider faster and faster, then jumping off to watch them crash. It was sort of a mean thing, but all the kids around took turns pushing and crashing.
Instead this time the rider popped a wheelie and the sharp edge of the back axle cover chopped down on my foot like a pediatric guillotine at five years old.
Decades later my boys came home with their own bike wreck injuries, like a hole in their knee. Ah, the good times shared.

Life lesson? Watch out for sharp edges where you don’t expect them.

My first neighborhood had a big slow kid who liked to put a ball in the street gutter and whack it with a bat. He’d hit it then give a big slow laugh while he walked up to hit it again.
When he got to my house one of the kids in the front yard needed a close up view so they crawled behind big Alex who smacked him in the face on the back swing. No hilarity ensured.

Life lesson? Make some noise. Like a bear bell in the woods, let danger beware.

Another neighborhood kid had trouble settling into the kindergarten routine and fell off the school porch on his chin. Really, his chin.
Took it on the chin. Life was hard, I’m telling you.

Life lesson? Don’t get too rowdy when you’re on the edge of a porch that drops three feet down.

In first grade a kid ran to school on a cold day with his hands in his coat pockets. He tripped over a lump in the sidewalk and landed on his forehead.
He showed up for class in a daze with a second head sized lump. Mrs. Baker called the parents.

Life lesson? Don’t run with your hands in your pockets. And scissors, don’t run with scissors. Or at the swimming pool. No running.

One writer said everyone has a book in them, at least one, and it would be poorly written, in disarray, and not read by anyone but their mother. And she wouldn’t like the way she was portrayed.
If your learn empathy, then you have millions of stories crowding the ‘to do’ list. Feel what someone else feels and you feel more alive.
A recent post, like yesterday, hit on The Humanities as a place to learn, to seek, to question. It sounds so high toned it’s hilarious as if the humanities only exist in an ivory tower. Education is never a bad word.
A life lesson is real if you let it settle in enough to mean something more than the time your parents called the police on you in junior high, or your dad showing how to work with authority when you went to the county seat for stealing soda pop, or chased a cow through a wheat field in a borrowed pickup.
Sometimes they are unbelievable? That’s the best life lesson.
About David Gillaspie

I am a writer. This is my blog story day by day.