LIFE-CHANGING LESSONS (WE DON’T LEARN AT SCHOOL)

(WE DON’T LEARN AT SCHOOL)

We can learn to live better says Alain de Botton

PHILOSOPHER AND WRITER ALAIN DE BOTTON BELIEVES YOU CAN LEARN TO LIVE BETTER, WHICH IS WHY HE FOUNDED THE SCHOOL OF LIFE. HERE HE EXPLAINS HOW TO BEGIN

Together with colleagues, I set up and run The School of Life because I believe that the ability to learn is one of the most basic things about being human. At the same time, traditional schools fail to teach us so much of what we really need to succeed and cope with life. Most of us leave school without ever having been taught how to understand ourselves, have satisfying conversations, succeed at relationships or cope with the working world. It’s as if schools teach us anything other than what we really need to know: how to be less unhappy adults! The School of Life believes in trying to transmit a few key ideas before it’s too late; it wants – above all – to save us time. Here are some of the ideas that we put forward in our book and in our classrooms.

1 GUIDE YOUR PARTNER THROUGH YOUR FLAWS

Love is, as we all know in theory but keep ignoring in practice, 90% about good communication. And that means the capacity to give another person an accurate picture of what is happening in our emotional and psychological lives – and to hear what may be going on in theirs with openness and empathy. A good communicator has the skill to take their partner, in a reassuring and gentle way, without melodrama or fury, into some of the trickiest areas of their personality and warn them of what is there – like a tour guide to a disaster zone. They can explain what is problematic in such a way that their partner will not be terrified, but can come to understand, be prepared for and may perhaps forgive and accept.

2 BEWARE OF BUSY-NESS

One of the problems of the modern world is our hyperactivity. Someone who looks extremely active, whose diary is filled from morning till night, who is always running to answer messages and meet clients, may appear to be the opposite of lazy. But secretly, there may be a lot of avoidance going on beneath the outward frenzy. Busy people are a hive of activity, yet they often don’t get around to working out their real feelings about so much. They constantly delay the investigation into their own direction. Their busy-ness is, in fact, a subtle but powerful form of distraction.

There is so much that happens to us every day, so many excitements, regrets, suggestions and emotions, that we should, if we are living consciously, spend at least an hour a day processing it all. Most of us manage, at best, a few minutes, and thereby let the marrow of life escape us. We do so not because we are forgetful or bad, but because our societies protect us from our responsibilities to ourselves through their cult of activity. We are granted every excuse not to undertake the truly difficult labour of leading more conscious, more searching and more intensely felt lives.

The next time we feel a bit ‘lazy’, rather than rushing to fill the void, we should imagine that, perhaps, a deep part of us is preparing to give birth to a big thought. There is no point hurrying the process. We need to lie still and let the idea gestate – sure that it may eventually prove its worth. We may need to risk being accused of gross laziness in order, one day, to put into motion projects and initiatives we can feel proud of.

‘MOST OF US LET THE MARROW OF LIFE ESCAPE US’

3 THINK BEFORE YOU SLEEP

A lot of insomnia is a kind of revenge for some of the thoughts we have carefully omitted to have during the day. So important are the questions we need to tackle, something within us – you might call it an inner guardian or conscience – prefers that we should stop deriving all the many obvious benefits of sleep rather than leave certain issues untreated for much longer. This points us to an important solution to insomnia: not so much a pill, or a special kind of tea or a long bath but, principally, more time for thinking, in the reasonable hours of the day. Sometimes, insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think.

‘IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE STRENGTHS WITHOUT WEAKNESSES’

4 ACCEPT THAT LOVE IS DIFFICULT

How happy we are is to a large extent dependent on whether we judge certain problems to be normal or not. And because our societies have failed to normalise – and speak honestly about – a great many issues in love, it is easy to believe ourselves uniquely cursed. We not only feel unhappy; we feel unhappy that we’re unhappy. When difficulties strike, we start to feel that we are going out with a particularly cretinous human. The sadness must be someone’s fault, and naturally we conclude that the blame has to lie with the partner.

We avoid the far truer and gentler conclusion: that we are trying to do something very difficult, at which almost no one succeeds completely.

At an extreme, we exit the relationship far too early. Rather than adjust our ideas of what relationships in general are like, we shift our hopes to new people whom – we ardently trust – won’t suffer any of the irritating problems we experienced with the last partner. We blame our lover in order not to blame love itself, the truer but more elusive target.

Love will prove challenging for us not for accidental or unique reasons, but for structural and intractable ones. Once we understand the true nature of love, sorrows will move from being symptoms of a personal curse to simply being facts of life. That will already be huge and consoling progress.

5 SEE WEAKNESS AS PART AND PARCEL OF STRENGTH

It’s at moments of particularly acute irritation with other people, especially our partners, that we need to rehearse the ‘weakness of strength’ theory: it is impossible to have strengths without weaknesses. Every virtue has an associated weakness and not all the virtues can belong together in a single person. This theory can help calm us down in moments of crisis because it changes the way we see the defects and failings of others. Our minds tend to hive off the strengths and see them as essential, while deeming the weaknesses as a freakish add-on, but in truth, the weaknesses are part and parcel of the strengths. This theory usefully undermines the unhelpful idea that – if only we looked a bit harder – we would find someone who was always perfect to be around. If strengths are invariably connected to failings, there won’t be anyone who is remotely flawless. We may well find people with different strengths, but they will also have a new litany of weaknesses.

6 CELEBRATE LIFE ONE DAY AT A TIME

Much of what we place our hopes in will be ready for us in a very long time indeed, in months or even decades from now, if ever: the successful completion of a novel, a sufficient sum of money to buy a house or begin a new career, the discovery of a suitable partner, a move to another country. In the list of our most intensely felt hopes, few entries stand to come to fruition this season or next, let alone by tonight. It’s normal to be very ambitious and hold out for all that we want. Why would we celebrate hobbling, when we wish to run? Why accept friendship, when we crave passion? But if we reach the end of the day and no one has died, no limbs have been broken, a few lines have been written and one or two encouraging and pleasant things have been said, then that is already an achievement worthy of celebration. How natural and tempting to put one’s faith in big projects that take years, but how much wiser it might be to bring all one’s faculties of appreciation and love to bear on that most modest and easily dismissed of increments: the day already in hand.