Nobody Gave Us a Manual

When we're young, we spend years being educated. We learn mathematics, science, history, languages, and all sorts of other things that are supposed to prepare us for the world. We sit exams, collect qualifications and eventually find ourselves stepping out into adulthood, hopefully equipped with enough knowledge to make our way.

But I sometimes wonder how much of that preparation was actually about understanding ourselves.

How do we deal with disappointment? What happens when a relationship breaks down? How do we recognise when we're unhappy, or understand why we react the way we do? What do we do when the life we thought we were going to have turns out to be something quite different?

And how do we know whether the decisions we're making are really our own, or simply what we've come to believe is expected of us?

I certainly don't remember being taught much about those things.

Of course, we learn from our parents, our families, teachers, friends, and the people around us. They all influence how we see the world and how we understand our place in it. Some of what we learn serves us well. Other things we carry for years without ever really stopping to question them.

And perhaps that's part of the challenge.

We grow up absorbing ideas about what success looks like, what a good career should be, how relationships are supposed to work, and what it means to be a responsible adult. We begin making decisions based on those ideas, often without recognising where they came from.

Then life happens.

We fall in love, lose people, change jobs, have children, experience disappointment, make mistakes and sometimes find ourselves in situations we never imagined we'd be facing.

And somehow, through all of that, we're expected to know what we're doing.

I've been thinking about this in relation to my own life. I'm 58 now, and when I look back at some of the decisions I've made, I can see things quite differently from how I saw them at the time. There are moments when I wish I'd understood myself better, when I wish I'd been able to recognise what was really going on rather than simply reacting to whatever was happening around me.

But I didn't have the understanding then that I have today.

And even today, I'm still learning.

I sometimes catch myself behaving in a certain way or reacting to something, and afterwards I find myself wondering where that came from. Why did that bother me? Why did I feel the need to respond? What was I actually trying to protect, prove, or avoid?

It's quite extraordinary, really, how much there is to discover about someone we've spent our entire lives with.

Ourselves.

Through my coaching conversations, I've also come to appreciate just how different everyone's experience of life can be. Two people can find themselves in what looks like a similar situation, yet the way they experience it can be completely different. We all bring our own history, beliefs, fears, hopes and expectations into whatever we're facing.

And we don't always understand those things ourselves, let alone recognise them in somebody else.

Perhaps that's something worth remembering when we're quick to judge another person's decisions or wonder why they haven't handled something the way we might have done.

We don't know everything they've experienced, what they've learned along the way, or what they're still trying to understand.

I don't think there's ever going to be a manual that tells us exactly how to live. And I'm not sure I'd want one, because whose version of life would it be teaching us to follow?

But I do wonder whether we could spend a little more time helping people understand themselves, rather than simply preparing them for what they're expected to do.

And perhaps we could be a little more patient with ourselves along the way.

I've spent 58 years getting to know myself, and there are still days when I surprise myself. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes not quite so much.

I imagine that will continue.

So as I sit here this Sunday morning, I'm reminded that we're all making our way through life with whatever understanding we have at the time. We learn things, we get things wrong, we change our minds, and occasionally discover something about ourselves that makes us look back and smile.

And perhaps there's some comfort in knowing that none of us has all the answers.

We're still learning how to be ourselves.