School has done a lot for me in my lifetime. It taught me how to be literate, it taught me to be curious and have a love of learning, it taught me how to use the alphabet in math, whether I liked it or not. It taught me about hypotheses and hypotenuses.
But there are things that school never taught me. Things that no amount of formal education could ever teach me, or prepare me to learn. And yet, they seem to be the things are absolutely the most important to learn.
Like how to be recover from a broken heart. Or how to be resilient when tragedy strikes. Or how to be empathetic. And how to love.
All those years of theorems and formulas all worth nothing in the end. Everything that is really worth learning almost always has to be learned the hard way. The painful way. The way that makes us do the most growing-- emotionally, spiritually, mentally.
By way of recent events, I was reminded of how crucial it is that we learn these lessons in life. It was nothing that school could have prepared us for, but somehow, naturally, through the course of our lives, we develop such knowledge.
Through developing personal relationships we learn about love. We learn how to love, how to be loved, and how to keep love alive.
When those relationships suffer or are strained, we learn what it's like to have a broken heart. And we learn how to recover by rekindling strong relationships, or perhaps, building new ones. And someday we hit a point where we forget how bad that broken heart once hurt.
We learn to be resilient by going through hard things. No one is immune, but we each learn in our way and time how to really be resilient to tragedy and heartache and suffering. That doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt, it just means that somehow we figure out how to bounce back anyway.
And empathy becomes a natural characteristic that we attain from the growth of the tragedies we experience in life.
Each lesson comes at a price, and it's not a cheap price either. You've heard that phrase, "You get what you pay for"? I think that's true in life as well. These lessons that life teaches us come at a high cost, but what we get in return is always worth the price, even though it may not seem like it at the beginning.
There's a scripture in the Book of Mormon that explains it so perfectly. 2 Nephi 2:11 emphasizes opposition. Somehow, when it's all said and done we realize that the price we paid to learn these painful lessons actually, in turn, gave us so much more than we could have ever imagined. When our hearts are broken, our capacity to love automatically increases. The deeper we feel sorrow, the more potential we have to also feel happiness. And that is beautiful.
I think about the sorrow that I've seen in life, and the sorrow and heartbreak that I have seen others endure, and it is nothing if not empowering. It is inspiring to see the way that we, as human beings, have the potential to overcome, well, anything. It's amazing to see how people come together to show empathy and love when tragedies strike in the lives of others. It somehow motivates in all of us, the desire to be the best version of ourselves.
And in the process of becoming the best we can be we will probably say the wrong things, or awkwardly try to serve, or fumble back and forth with responding to the innate desires and promptings that we are given to reach out to others.
But I think that the most beautiful part of the process is the way that we all grow together, and in the end, God has promised that we will all become better and stronger because of it. And for that, I couldn't possibly be more grateful.
