I Always Ask Myself, “What Is This Trying to Teach Me?”

I briefly studied business administration at an online American university. I was there for only a month, but I remember one lesson in particular. We were taught to train ourselves to see opportunities where other people see difficulties.

I have thought about that many times since then.

I briefly studied business administration at an online American university, and although I was there for only a month, one of the most important things I learned was that we must train ourselves to see opportunities where others see difficulties. I have often observed that opportunities are rarely discovered. More often, they are created. Life has a way of teaching us certain truths so repeatedly that they eventually become ordinary, and because they seem obvious (sometimes, painfully obvious), we dismiss them as unimportant. But sometimes the most obvious lessons are the ones we need to hear again. Instead of seeing ourselves as victims of every inconvenience, disappointment, or closed door, we can cultivate the habit of asking, “What is this situation trying to teach me?” That question does not make difficulties disappear, but it changes the way we face them. It moves us, even if only slightly, from despair toward curiosity, from helplessness toward responsibility, and from simply enduring life toward participating in it. Ultimately, this is part of the message I have tried to leave in my books, particularly My Journey, where I write about becoming the captain of our own destinies rather than allowing circumstances to permanently determine the direction of our lives. These days, I am studying sociology, art, and the humanities, while slowly and deliberately expanding my knowledge of history, international relations, business correspondence, and general knowledge. I am particularly interested in understanding how societies are formed, how cultures influence people, how nations relate to one another, and how the events of the past continue to shape the world we live in. I may even learn another language someday, perhaps Arabic or Russian, as I casually mentioned in My Journey. I am not trying to come across as impressive. I am simply curious. I like learning things that make the world feel a little larger than it did yesterday. I want to keep moving, inch by inch, toward a deeper understanding of people, history, ideas, and the strange, complicated world we have inherited. Perhaps that is another lesson life keeps teaching me: sometimes the point is not to have all the answers, but to remain curious enough to keep asking better questions. – Khadijah Maulion Masorong

I have noticed that opportunities are rarely simply found. More often, they are created. Sometimes they come from a situation we never wanted in the first place. A disappointment changes our plans. A closed door forces us to look somewhere else. A mistake makes us learn something we would never have learned otherwise.

Life has a strange way of teaching us.

Some of its lessons are so obvious that we stop paying attention to them. We already know that failure can teach us. We know that difficult experiences can change us. We know that we cannot control everything that happens to us. We know that we have to keep going even when we do not know exactly where we are going.

Yet knowing something and living by it are two different things.

When something inconvenient happens to me, I have slowly developed the habit of asking myself, “What is this trying to teach me?” I find that question more useful than asking, “Why is this happening to me?”

The second question can leave me sitting inside the problem.

The first makes me look around.

It does not mean that every bad thing is secretly good. I do not believe that. Some things hurt. Some things are unfair. Some losses remain losses, and there is no need to dress them up in beautiful words. Life can be difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with whether we deserve it.

But even when I cannot change what has happened, I can still ask what I can learn from it.

Sometimes the lesson is very small.

Perhaps I need to be more patient. Perhaps I need to be more careful. Perhaps I trusted the wrong person. Perhaps I need to learn something I have been avoiding. Perhaps I need to change direction. Sometimes the lesson is simply that I am stronger than I thought I was.

I think this is one of the simplest ways of taking responsibility for our lives.

We cannot choose everything that happens to us. We cannot choose the family we are born into, the country we are born in, the mistakes other people make, the things we lose, or the unexpected turns that come into our lives. But there is still a small space between what happens and what we do next.

I have always been interested in that space.

It is probably one reason I continue to study.

I am presently learning more about sociology, art, and the humanities. I am also slowly moving toward a deeper understanding of history, international relations, business correspondence, and general knowledge. I am not studying these things because I need to collect more titles after my name. I simply want to understand more of the world around me.

The older I become, the more I realize how little I know.

That realization does not frighten me as much as it used to. In some ways, I find it comforting. There is something beautiful about discovering that the world is much larger than what we have already learned.

Sociology, for example, makes me look at ordinary life differently. It asks why people live the way they do, why societies develop certain habits, why some groups have more opportunities than others, and how families, communities, institutions, and culture shape us.

History takes me somewhere else, but not entirely somewhere else. It makes me look backward and understand that the world we live in did not simply appear. Countries have histories. Borders have histories. Languages have histories. Religions have histories. Even ordinary customs have histories.

What seems normal to us today may have taken centuries to become normal.

International relations interests me for much the same reason. I want to understand why countries become friends, why they become enemies, why they trade with one another, why they enter alliances, and why events that happened long ago can still affect relationships between nations today.

I am beginning to understand that these subjects are not really separate.

History enters politics. Politics enters economics. Economics enters people’s homes. Religion enters culture. Culture enters language. Geography affects war and trade. Art reflects the time in which it was made. Literature preserves feelings that official records sometimes leave behind.

Everything seems to touch everything else.

That is probably what I enjoy most about learning.

One question leads to another.

I might even learn another language someday. I have casually mentioned Arabic and Russian before, including in My Journey. I still like the idea. There is something wonderful about learning a language and realizing that another people has found its own way of describing the world.

I am not trying to make myself sound impressive.

I think I am simply curious.

That curiosity has followed me through different parts of my life. I have never been able to stay interested in only one thing for very long. I want to know how things work. I want to know why people think the way they do. I want to understand where ideas came from and where they might lead.

Sometimes I think curiosity is one of the quietest forms of hope.

When you are curious, you have not completely given up on the world. You are still willing to look at it again.

That is also why I keep returning to the question, “What is this trying to teach me?”

It is a small question, but it has changed the way I look at difficult moments.

Instead of immediately seeing an inconvenience as something that has happened against me, I try to see what it might be asking of me. Perhaps it is asking me to slow down. Perhaps it is asking me to learn. Perhaps it is asking me to let go of something. Perhaps it is simply asking me to be patient.

I do not always understand the lesson immediately.

Sometimes I only understand it years later.

There are things that happened to me that made no sense when they happened. Only much later did I realize that they had changed the direction of my life. What seemed like a detour became part of the road.

This is something I have written about in My Journey. I have always believed in the idea of being the captain of our own destinies. Not because we can control the sea, but because we still have some say in where we point the boat.

The sea will do what it does.

The weather will change.

We will sometimes lose our way.

But we can keep learning how to navigate.

That, perhaps, is where I am now.

I am learning slowly. I am reading. I am asking questions. I am discovering subjects that I knew very little about before. I am trying to understand history, people, societies, cultures, nations, and the many things that connect them.

I do not expect to know everything.

I only want to know a little more than I knew yesterday.

And when life gives me something I did not ask for, I hope I will remember to pause before I complain.

I hope I will ask the quieter question instead.

“What is this trying to teach me?”

Sometimes, that question may be the beginning of a different life.