Rules For Being Human

A friend once worked as a guide for a wilderness program for troubled youth called Aspen Academy out of Loa, Utah. He brought this home from the field once and I thought it was so useful I’ve carried it around ever since. I hope you’ll find it instructive, too.

Rules For Being Human

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours the entire period this time around.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as valuable and as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works”.

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

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

6. “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” becomes a “here” you will simply obtain another “there” that will, again, look better than “here”.

7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.

10. You will forget all this.