FIVE PEOPLE, FIVE LESSONS

If heaven, as Mitch Albom says in his the five people you meet in heaven, is where all our yesterdays will finally make sense – and I do believe that is part of what we will learn in the life to come – what lessons will those five people teach us now that it is too late to learn them? In other words, had we known and lived out those lessons in this life, would this life have made more sense to us as we lived it?

   Perhaps. Perhaps not. Even when we know why something turned out the way it did, we still have to live with the results. Our foolishness and sinfulness get us into many messes. When we are up to our necks in an alligator pit, we may fully know how we got there. That is no consolation as long as the alligators are aiming to eat us alive. What we have to do is get out of that pit ASAP. Then we can kick ourselves for being so stupid in the first place, for getting ourselves into that mess when we knew better.

   Then, too, how often have we said to ourselves, once safely out of the pit, blood pressure back to normal, "This surely has been a good lesson for me," and then found ourselves back in that alligator pit once again? Lessons learned are often lessons ignored. We study history to learn its lessons so that we will be spared the pain of learning them from firsthand experience. Nevertheless, history repeats itself, as we all know firsthand.

  Yet, we still desire to learn more about ways to save ourselves from pain and suffering and to make this life both better and more understandable. So Albom’s five heavenly people remind us of at least five lessons we have already learned but which we often forget when rushing from here to there, which is how we end up in all those alligator pits in the first place.

   First: there are no random acts. We are all connected because we can no more separate one life from another than we can separate a breeze from the wind. Every act, intentional or accidental has consequences with unperceived and never-ending results. Second: sacrifice is a part of life. (The word means "to make holy" which is what we become through sacrifice and only through sacrifice.) Third: When hurt, as we all are, we need to forgive, now, unconditionally and unasked. To not forgive is to live in the past, which prevents living in the present.

   Fourth: Love has no end even when the ones we love die. Love lives on in our memory and in us. Fifth, whoever we are is who we are supposed to be. Wanting to be someone else is simply a waste of time and prevents us from living who we are to the fullest at every moment in our lives.

   Life’s little lessons? Heaven’s little lessons? To be sure, simple but profound. I would like to assert that one of these lessons is more important than the others or that they could be listed in order of importance, but I cannot. The truth is, I think, they are interconnected and cannot be separated one from another. Albom has given me a whole lot to think about, and I’m still thinking. You, too?

WJP