Back to School

During the summer, kids usually sneer at the idea that returning to school is dead ahead and their free afternoons and evenings will now be overtaken by lessons and numbers they will almost never use as adults. (They knew it but they had to keep us busy somehow.) Who still uses long division? I admit, I have a few times but computers have replaced our brains already, and now perhaps our livelihoods and our cars and maybe ultimately our - free will? I hope I’m dust before that happens.

I have a nice little fantasy that all those monks in the Himalayas have to say when someone asks them for the meaning of life is: Love. Love is the meaning of life, and yet so many people go without it. What is the meaning of their lives? I think the monks keep a parchment in the breast pockets of their orange wraps that says, “Don’t tell them that they have to suffer by learning hard lessons for their souls to progress. Just don’t say it.”

I’ve always wanted to question these folks who have near death experiences and come back to say that, once you’re on the other side, you suddenly know EVERYthing, including, I presume, the meaning of life. So my question is, if we suddenly know everything already as soon as we croak, why do we have to learn such hard lessons while we’re here in the meat suit? This leaves me pondering the following alternate explanations:

1. We are all in a video game written by a race of very advanced but abjectly sadistic extraterrestrials. Sadistic little grey bastards.

2. We did this on a dare. As declared in one of the more spectacular near-death experiences I read about in the 80s where a woman went on a prolonged visit to the other side, she was told: “Only the most valiant spirits dare come to Earth.” I like this one. I think this one, yes. This makes me feel like someday we will all be draped with shiny medallions while standing on a platform as they play the Earth anthem. All the namby-pamby spirits will be cheering in the stands and we will have our names on plaques on pearly buildings in some fabulous happy city.

3. This 3rd dimension—this sometimes really crappy dimension—is a school where we come to learn lessons, sometimes the hard way and sometimes through joy. I think one of the major lessons we are here to learn is gratitude, and that usually comes with relief or a gift or just a sunny sky on your day off. It sure feels like school sometimes. And personally, just when I think I have graduated to some higher level on the spiral of understanding and maturity, another lesson gets slapped down on my desk. It ain’t over until it’s over.

So it’s back to school time for the kids, and for anyone who is still alive. They say you don’t check out until you’ve learned everything you came here to learn. Many years back when I had just arrived in California, I encountered first a young rattlesnake living under my front steps, and then an enormous gopher snake on the walkway, and then another kind of snake in the wood pile, not to mention yet another one who took my rent check every month. So I had to look up “Snake Medicine” and was told that it indicated a transformation though learning lessons. Way back then, I asked, “OK, but can I learn these lessons from bunnies and hamsters? Does it have to be snakes all the time?”

I read recently that every time we learn something new, it creates new wrinkles in our brains (where I would like them to stay). I like to learn. I fight it at the start, but then I surrender, and then I’m glad I did. So I guess that’s the Back to School for us oldish people — resistance is futile if you want a wrinkly brain, so surrender and JUST DO IT. And then you’ll be glad and one more thing will be easy instead of frustrating.

Welcome back to school after what I hope was a lovely summer. I hope that part about valiant spirits gives somebody else a little shot of validation as it does me every time I think about it. And may your school year, however old you are, go smoothly, with kindly teachers, decent lunches and awesome recesses.

© 2020 Laurie MacMillan All rights reserved.