When I discovered my child’s beloved Bunny gutted by my dog, I panicked.
Almost nothing in our home carries as much emotional value as Bunny.
Immediately, I went into Mom-is-gonna-fix-it mode, desperate to make this better before he got home from school. And I remembered that buried in some closet, we had a Back-Up Bunny! My son never took to it, but Back-Up Bunny was our insurance plan.
I ended up at the cleaners, home to our town’s very best seamstress, Sanda, and presented both bunnies.
She surveyed the situation while I’m all: “Can we just take Bunny’s head and attach it to Back-Up Bunny’s body?”
Now, Sanda is a sewing superhero. And yet, here is what she said: “I can’t do this without your son knowing.”
Wait…what? Was she serious? I mean, I was a guaranteed customer who’d clearly pay a pretty penny. And I wasn’t in the mood for parenting advice.
But Sanda looked at me knowingly and lovingly and said, “The right thing to do is tell your son. He can handle it. He obviously loves this bunny too much for me to do anything without his permission.”
I mean, c’mon! I didn’t need this poorly timed life lesson, which was what it was starting to feel like: a potential teachable moment. A potential marker in the development of my inner self, brought to be by what I suspected was a life-teacher, in the form of my local seamstress.
Since childhood, I've loved teachers and learning. So much that I earned a master’s in education and became a high school English teacher. These days, I’m a self development teacher. And I’ve always been curious about our two learning trajectories, as growing people. One, which is to acquire an academic education. And the other, which is to acquire a self education.
To become academically educated, we’re all familiar with the container of school. It’s concrete, linear and predictable.
To become self-educated, on the other hand, there is no standard container. No experts designing an individualized life-curriculum for our inner growth. And there are no assigned teachers. A self-education is abstract, circuitous and unpredictable.
But a self-education, which is about becoming self-aware, growing wise, and becoming your best self, is necessary to live a meaningful, emotional, spiritual, relational and humane life.
The reality is that when it comes to our self-education, it’s on us. It’s on us to be ready for teachable moments; it’s on us to craft our life-curriculum; and it’s on us to discover and learn from our life-teachers.
The fun part is that life-teachers can show up as anyone! Maybe they’re an academic teacher; but they could also be a custodian, a fellow passenger on a plane, a check-out clerk at the store, or a seamstress.
Life-teaching is when one’s human experience offers something profound to the shaping of another’s human experience. I define a life-teacher as one whose wisdom lovingly supports + guides the becoming of another.
Wisdom.
Wisdom, as I see, is an inner repository that begins to take shape as children and gets fuller and richer as we age. It’s a storehouse of our unique set of absorbed experiences, relationships + content. And typically, wisdom presents as a calm, confident understanding about some aspect of being a person. And further, research reveals that leaning into our wisdom as we age is a guaranteed path to living a meaningful life.
So gathering wisdom is actually a form of self-preservation. And life-teachers are wisdom’s ambassadors. Life-teachers are the wisdom source to becoming our best selves throughout life.
So, how to discover your life-teachers? And what to do once you’ve noticed them? Here are some tips:
It all begins when you DECIDE. (I love a good acronym; let’s break it down.)
D. Decide to be a life-learner. By making that simple decision, you open yourself up to a vast landscape of teachable moments.
E. Expect the unexpected. Everyone is a potential life-teacher, and the timeline for your teachable moments is entirely unpredictable.
C. Care for your self-education. No one else will care for your becoming as much as you will, so actively put yourself inside of opportunities that push your inner self forward. There’s no prescriptive path here, so make it fun!
I. Invite the wisdom of others — when you sense the love of wisdom’s presence, trust it and let it in.
D. Dig deep once wisdom has been imparted. Life-teaching is usually indirect. So get in the habit of asking yourself: what is there for me to learn here? And take the time to reflect on it.
E. Embrace discomfort. Inner growth is uncomfortable. But rather than resisting, welcome it! Because you will get to the other side of that discomfort, and you will be wiser for it.
Discomfort was all I felt when Sanda stopped me in my tracks with my kid’s mauled Bunny. Even as a self-development specialist, I was caught off guard… but I sensed that she knew something about being a person that I hadn’t yet learned. So, I sheepishly went home with Bunny and Back Up Bunny.
Later, I told my son about the incident. He cried. But after I reminded him of Back-Up Bunny and told him about Sanda, he lit up with hope. Together, we returned to Sanda’s shop—this time, he asked for her help.
And to my utter shock, he told her that Bunny was all he wanted for Christmas. I mean, how easily that lego set was dethroned. Sure enough, Sanda happily got to work.
This is my son on Christmas morning:
And.
Something else happened in all this—something subtle.
When Sanda received Bunny from my son, she looked at me, again, with a calm, confident knowing in her eyes that felt to me like an invisible, yet magical transmission, where a bit of her wisdom was now a bit of my wisdom too.
Here was Sanda, a woman, a grandmother, a seamstress, whose primary language and cultural background differed dramatically from mine, and yet, she was my life-teacher, whether or not she meant to be. I’d learned from her that when it comes to wisdom, if you’re open to it, willing to embrace it and then embody it, the wisdom becomes part of you too… so that one day, in someone else’s unexpected teachable moment, you can be a life-teacher too.
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I love this one, Lindsay! I am obsessed with learning and wisdom and life-teachers and the DECIDE acronym really spoke to me. Thank you!!!