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“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

We’ve most likely heard this saying and we may have even used it, ourselves. But what do you suppose it really means?

Where this quote originated, or if it’s even the entire quote, is up for debate. This is, however, a widely used quote with varying interpretations. This is my interpretation.

As a society as well as on an individual level, in general, we want someone to lead us and to show us the way to wherever it is we are wanting to go; someone who already has the answers, or so we like to believe. We want someone else to help us make sense of all the nonsense. We want them to tell us that we’re one of the “good ones” and then we want them to lead us to some perpetual feel-good state of being.

We’re always looking for a teacher to learn from and to teach us those wise and valuable life lessons—someone to show us how to understand and make the most of our existence. But we seem to be looking for a distinct type of person who will show up in our lives at just the right time to teach us, and we may even be looking for specific types of lessons. What’s more, we usually only want those lessons when we want them, or when we feel like we are ready for them. We may even go so far as to disregard anything that seems laborious or anything that causes us to experience discomfort.

So, let me see if I got this straight…there are those who want someone who has already put in the time and the effort and done the hard work to suddenly cross their paths? And they want them to have all these answers that make their lives easier or better, bypassing any hard work themselves?

When we hear the word “teacher,” many of us will automatically think of a teacher as another human being. I mean, we do like to personify everything. We give names to our vehicles and all sorts of other inanimate objects. We even personify the weather and nature: “Mother Nature,” anyone?

What we see depends on how we look, and how we look has a lot to do with the questions we ask. So, while we’ve been busy looking for an actual human teacher, what if we would’ve been spending our time looking for the lessons?

Because Life has already sent a teacher. That teacher’s name is Experience.

Every experience we have can be a lesson, which makes every experience a potential teacher; an opportunity to improve our skills, to improve our understanding, and to learn.

Whatever our experiences are, we should be learning from them. To learn from them we should be observing what happens, how it makes us feel, and why it makes us feel that way. Every experience we have should show us something about ourselves. This is what we should be doing with our experiences.

Trick question: if we all have different experiences and different ways of processing those experiences, aren’t we all going to have different answers, as well?

Listening to others—those who may have different views, opinions, or beliefs—can always teach us something. If all we notice are the ways in which they are different, we may feel the need to point out where we believe they are wrong. In this case, we are only focused on our “rightness” and their “wrongness” and we will probably not be open to listening and learning.

Every single person we encounter can teach us something we don’t know. But do we ever pause long enough to consider what that may be? Do we ever take into account how it is that they came to know what they do, or to believe the way they do?

If we are always examining someone’s appearance or behavior,

if we are always looking at what they have or don’t have,

if we are always attempting to analyze if they are “right” or “wrong,”

if we’re always evaluating how their beliefs and ideologies align, or don’t align, with our own,

if we are only assessing our similarities and differences,

when and how are we considering what we can learn from them?

If this is what we do with each encounter that is had with another human being, how are we possibly going to know when that “teacher” appears?

What if we dismiss someone simply because they aren’t like us, but they have an insight or they can explain something to us in a way that can profoundly impact our life?

What if that person who was so easily dismissed—probably because they seemed a bit weird or different, or just didn’t act like us or believe like us—actually had a piece of the puzzle that helped us make sense of everything?

It’s the hard times that are typically seen as good teaching moments. But those hard times are, quite often, made harder because of our own indecisiveness, our own pride/ego, or because of the way we have framed it in our mind.

Yes, we can learn something from every failure.

Every shame.

Every heartbreak.

Every pain.

Every close call.

Every miserable, humiliating, unhappy, or uncomfortable moment.

But even the amusing, good, quiet, happy, inspiring, boring, and beautiful moments hold something that we could learn as well.

It doesn’t matter what we know or don’t know. What matters is what we’re willing to learn. And every single moment can be a teacher, a time to examine our own minds and our own life.

It often takes time for these lessons to make sense (it rarely happens right away), but every situation, every encounter, every decision we make, every moment—every single experience we have can teach us something. But if we never question ourselves—never asking “what,” “why,” “how,” of ourselves—we’re just doing what we’ve seen done before and repeating what we’ve heard said before.

Aren’t many of the best teachers (the most memorable teachers) the ones who got something out of us that we didn’t realize was there? Aren’t they the ones who empowered us?

Don’t teachers get through to their students the best when questions are asked? Yes, but when it comes to Life we normally only ask questions until we get an answer that satisfies us, then we stop asking questions. We may stop asking questions because we either think we know or we don’t want to know, and those who are desperate for answers tend to not like a lot of questions. An answer is not a be-all-end-all, but if we’re looking for answers then we are likely to only accept an answer that confirms we are already right.

Answers are limiting. Questions are limitless.

There is no guru sitting on a mountaintop waiting to impart some timeless wisdom to us. The teacher has always been there. We don’t learn much just by reading or hearing the words of others. We learn from experiences, practice, and asking questions. It’s those experiences, paired with our willingness to ask questions and our readiness to learn, that teaches us who we are and what we are.

So when we’re continually looking for the lessons in life, we may find that life, itself, becomes the teacher. And when we learn those lessons, we may find parts of ourselves that were previously unknown to us. But it is our own expectations and beliefs that usually obstruct everything we could’ve learned along the way—like thinking that another individual will come along to be our teacher.

Life, if you ask me, is about learning. And just like it was when we were sitting in that classroom in front of a teacher at one time, there’s no learning without willingness, readiness, and receptiveness. The only thing holding us back is how honest we’re willing to be with ourselves, how vulnerable we’re willing to be with ourselves, and how deep we are willing to go.

Life will teach us whatever we want it to teach us—whatever we let it teach us.

But we will only receive what we’re willing to receive.

We will only hear what we’re willing to hear.

And we will only see what we’re willing to see.

Thus, we will only learn what we are willing to learn.

Everything will tell us what we want it to—until we ask it to tell us something different.

Even the wisest and the most all-knowing teacher is, at some point, going to tell us something that we don’t want to hear or don’t agree with. And if we are always looking for someone else to give us life’s tips and tricks and answers, then we are only doing what someone else does. If we are listening to what everyone else has to say about something or if we are holding out for answers that we can agree with, we will never experience the real teacher.

Life is the classroom, and class is always in session.

When we’re ready, life will teach us. With every experience we have, life is speaking to us. It’s telling us something about ourselves.

What we will learn depends a lot on the questions we ask.

“Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.” ~ Polly B. Berends

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