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Pleasant and unpleasant things occur to us. This is a fundamental Buddhist tenet, but also a pretty obvious fact of life. The older you get, typically, the more obvious it grows.

Life is often inconvenient, disappointing, frustrating. On the other end of the pain spectrum, life is sometimes quite painful. It sometimes seems unbearably painful. Eastern thought councils us to learn to evolve the quality of our reaction to unpleasantness of all kind. When we set about to evolve our “equanimity” and poise, the Masters recommend we start with the easy stuff, and work up to the hard stuff. Don’t start with something like losing your foot to the lawnmower, or your spouse having just said the one thing that is always guaranteed to completely send you off the deep end. Your temper is gone in such a case. It’s too late to work on your reaction, most likely.

No, start with things like work situations that are less comfortable or creative or productive than you hope for. I have been doing a lot of that lately. It sounds flip, but I mean it.

One of my recent spins on this is to look back at regular intervals on the lessons I have learned from unanticipated unpleasantness in my recent past. Examples. In 2007, I worked in several situations that seemed, at first and on the surface, quite intractable. How can I get my job done here? How can I make progress? Why don’t these people understand me or accept my message? Blah, blah, blah. Victim-talk.

I look back now and think, My Goodness, I have learned a lot in a year. As always happens, as I always say, Learning Happened. Learning always happens, and in retrospect is so much more golden than I have recognized in the past.

So, this is to say I am grateful for my learning opportunities, past, present, and future. I am grateful for my knowledge, my experience, and also for my ignorance and my mistakes. One friend says that experience is a tough teacher because she gives the test first. Another friend says that good judgment comes from experience, which comes from bad judgment.

So again, thanks. I am grateful for learning at a faster and faster rate. The learning keeps on flowing, and keeps on happening. And most blessedly, I am learning to be more and more grateful for my learning, and for each new day of it. The number of such days is finite for us all, and puts my mostly minor inconveniences in healthy perspective.