I Suggest Taking The Curriculum

I can remember the first time I heard one of my earliest spiritual teachers, Ram Das, tell the following story. He was asking a teacher of his own those big life questions, like: “Why am I even here? What am I doing in a body anyway? Hasn’t there been some sort of mistake?”

And his consummate guide (Emmanuel), answered with the following simple yet memorable statement:

“Ram Das, you’re in school! I suggest taking the curriculum.”

I thought of this story recently as the neighborhood kids – equipped with new backpacks and freshly combed pigtails - embarked on their first day of school. One such little girl even whizzed past me, Theo (and her parents) on her scooter yelling, Yayyyyyy! It’s my first day of schoooooooooool!”

It was remarkable to see and remember that palpable excitement many of us shared in our early days of learning. That expansion of the mind to fresh experiences of discovery and friendship. And the gift of an actual demarcation of a new start – a new year – how valuable that can be as we think about the cycles of a life.

Many of us struggle to define new beginnings in a modern working adulthood. Sure there are new thresholds we cross if we go to grad school, take a new job, or move to other places. And those are all wonderful and exciting things. Yet, their newness eventually wears off. We graduate. We get used to our new surroundings. We crave another first day of school.

But here, in this context of Ram Das and Emmanuel, things start to shift. Suddenly the elements of our daily lives – every crevice and corner and thread - become the matter of life’s curriculum.

We get permission to be students of humanity. And if there’s some infinite part of us that carries on long after death, we get to study, through our experience, what it means to feel the friction and confinement of the finite. An experiment of suffering, and joy, and most of all remembering that this is simply part of “earth school.” We don’t have to make it life or death. It becomes life, or more life.

I have always loved school. I have adored the concept of learning something I didn't know before. Of actually feeling the rooms of the mind stretch to places wider and higher than they were before. But the school of Life has nothing to do with whether or not you are in an official program. And it invites us to stretch everything. To look beyond desks and classrooms and schoolbooks, to the classroom of the world. The moving surroundings of our perception.

I find myself pondering questions I’d ask Emmanuel, for myself and for others, and how he might answer with his captivating refrain:

What if someone you love becomes really sick?