How to Deal With Learning Life Lessons "Too Late" - Think Deep

How to Deal With Learning Life Lessons “Too Late”

You ate too much sugar and now you have diabetes. You ate too much meat and now you have heart disease. You didn’t save for retirement and now it’s tough living in your golden years.

It’s a real punch in the gut. If you only knew back then what you know now…but that’s the thing though – that’s EVERYONE’S story.

Everybody missed something because the fact is that there is NO possible way ANYBODY could have learned EVERY life lesson back when they were young. It’s impossible. Even if they were told all the life lessons, as young people often are, they’ll do their own thing anyways.

Realize too that a good portion of life lessons can ONLY be learned through experience and since young people don’t have much experience, they won’t be able to understand certain life lessons and therefore, won’t apply them, only to learn them later on seemingly “too late”.

But back to the moment of painful realization when you’ve discovered you learned a life lesson too late. So here you are. The lesson has hit you square in the face. It hurts. It hurts BAD. It hurts SO bad because you feel disgusted with yourself, lamenting how stupid you were, how you so desperately wish you could go back in time, but you realize you can’t change the past and it’s just that feeling of helplessness and stupidity and self loathing and the painting of a bleak future that just kills you and eats at your core.

It’s a very vulnerable position to be in.

Now what?

First off, this moment is a great learning experience because chances are, it won’t be the last one so if you can figure out a “formula” to use to bounce back, the next time won’t be as bad since you can just plug and play.

That formula can involve exercise, a guided thought process as you sift through and try to make sense of everything you’re thinking and feeling, a person you can call to better understand everything, etc.

Now one of the things that’s exacerbating the situation is focusing on the negative so the opposite would be to focus on the positive but what possible positive things could there be? Here’s the thing.

If you search hard enough, you’ll find them.

It could be as simple as realizing that you’re still alive after being diagnosed with heart disease. At least you didn’t die yet! A lot of people don’t know they have heart disease and just die of a heart attack out of the blue.

You now have a chance at reversing it through diet and exercise. Friends and relatives you haven’t seen in a while may contact you wishing you well or they may visit you. You’ve got that going for you.

Suddenly, the smallest things can seem like extreme luxuries now that you see you have a potential new lease on life.

Once you realize that there are some good things to pluck out, the next step is to see how this is good for you.

Again, if you search hard enough, you’ll find the answers.

First off, this is good for you in terms of creating huge motivation. People tend not to change until a big event hits their life and learning a life lesson seemingly too late definitely qualifies.

Second, the journey you go through in terms of dealing with this late life lesson can open up new worlds, people, and experiences you never would’ve been able to have before.

In your quest to reverse your heart disease, you may meet and make new friends in the gym or heck, maybe even a future spouse.

You may be determined to help people eat right and exercise so they never have to experience heart disease for themselves by creating your own site, videos, podcasts, etc.

You may actually get to doing all those things on your list that you wanted to do in your life now that you had a big wake up call.

And as you keep doing all this, you’ll soon discover in a weird way that you’re actually GLAD it happened to you.

But when people hear that, they roll their eyes thinking you’re just saying that to make yourself feel better and in a sense, yeah you do feel better when you say that but here’s the thing.

That’s the power of the human being.

To be able to CHOOSE one’s own experience. To CHOOSE one’s own meaning. You can make it up. There’s so many different ways to view the same situation. You can pick and choose what makes the best sense for you and if it makes you happier, why wouldn’t you pick that point of view?

There’s no law that says you have to view it THIS way and ONLY this way.

No.

You can CHOOSE how you’re going to view it.

It’s a very powerful too because in essence, you’re time traveling. You can in a way re-write your own history. You can look back in your life and instead of feeling profound sadness and regret, find that all you experienced was in fact, the best thing that could’ve happened to you because it led to where you are today which has all these great things that you’ve searched for and discovered.

And then with that fresh new resolve, try with all your might to do your best to make the most of your situation and what you’ll find is that the timing was not too late after all.

It was just right all along.

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