Ten Things Tuesday

My adopted mom is currently undergoing treatment for throat cancer. I’ve not written much about it yet, but there’ll be quite a few posts coming about how this woman walks her walk; she understands her faith well enough to let it sustain her as she faces this really uncomfortable and potentially scary thing.

She and I were driving home from one of her radiation treatments last week, and she was marveling that people find her so incredible. They’re amazed that she’s always pretty upbeat, that she’s smiling, that her attitude is so very positive. What they don’t understand is that the only difference between her and everyone else is that she understands that she has a choice in how she deals with this. She can be frightened and defensive and defeated, or not. She can choose to be angry and resentful, or not. She can choose to accept pain and suffering, or not. She can be grouchy and demanding, or not. She chooses the not because she knows she has that choice, and she knows, without any hesitation, that regardless of how this turns out, it’s going to be okay. She’ll survive this or she won’t, but in the end, it’s all going to be okay.

She is my hero, and I aspire to know my own faith in the Universe as well as she knows hers.

Today’s ten things list comes from something my mom has had on her fridge since before I came into her life some 25 years ago. It starts to explain, just a little bit, where she’s coming from in her thinking on her place in the Universe, and every time I read it, a little piece of me says “yes, that’s true.” See if some of it doesn’t resonate for you.

Ten Rules for Being Human by Cherie Carter-Scott

Rule One:
You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.

Rule Two:
You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called ‘life.’ Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.

Rule Three:
There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.

Rule Four:
A lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.

Rule Five:
Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

Rule Six:
‘There’ is no better than ‘here’. When your ‘there’ has become a ‘here,’ you will simply obtain a ‘there’ that will look better to you than your present ‘here’.

Rule Seven:
Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.

Rule Eight:
What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.

Rule Nine:
Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

Rule Ten:
You will forget all of this at birth. You can remember it if you want by unravelling the double helix of inner knowing.

–Cherie Carter-Scott, From “If Life is a Game, These are the Rules”