RULE FIVE: LEARNING DOES NOT END

There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

Does it ever seem like just when you have mastered one lesson, another challenge presents itself almost immediately? Just when you get what it means to possess self-esteem, you are faced with a lesson in humility. As soon as you get what it means to be a good parent, your children leave home and you need to learn the lesson of letting go. You figure out one day the importance of having time to yourself, and the next day you are called to support someone else. Striving to get all the details of life under control is impossible because life will present new lessons daily.

You never actually finish all your lessons, for as long as you are alive, there are lessons to learn. Regardless of your age, or station in life, or success level, you will never be exempt from the lessons you need to learn in order to continue growing. Your journey on Earth is constantly unfolding, and while your wisdom grows and your capacity to deal with challenges expands,new lessons will present themselves. In fact, as the depth of your wisdom increases, your capacities expand proportionately, allowing you to take on and solve with greater ease more advanced challenges.

It may come as a relief to finally understand that you never actually master life, and that striving to do so will only lead to frustration. The best you can do is strive to master the process by which you experience it. Life is a year-round school from which you never actually graduate, so it is the learning process itself that brings true value to existence.

The challenge of Rule five is to embrace your role as a perpetual student of life. This means giving in to the idea that you actually don't know everything that you need to , and you never will. It also means that you need to convince your ego that being a student does not make you inferior. In fact, being a student opens up worlds of possibilities that are invisible ot those who are unwilling to accept this role.

In order to rise to the challenge of embracing your role as perpetual student, you need to learn the lessons of surrender, commitment, humility, and flexibility. Without these important lessons, you will never be able to open your mind, heart, and spirit wide enough to allow yourself to take in all that life has to teach you.