Spoiler Alert: There's No Handbook on Adulting
This Calvin & Hobbes comic so clearly defines one of my great life disappointments: There's no handbook. I always figured there'd be a point at which I'd have all the answers, or at least have a simple place to look them up. I'm not talking about a Biblical-level handbook ("Love God, Love One Another" is one kind of guide), but something more specific ("What do you do when your toilet's overflowing?" "How do you help a friend in a bad relationship?" "How do you find an internship or decide which job to take or buy a car or understand the endless fine print on a lease or grieve a horrible loss or recover from a humiliating mistake or or or...").
My students often come to me with their own life questions, assuming I have a copy of the Big Book O' Answers to Everything. And at least fairly often, they leave my office thinking they were right and wondering where they can get their own copy of the Big Book. What they don't know is...all I have is a whole lot more experience than they do at ad-libbing it, winging my way through the world.
After a while, you recover from enough mistakes and grieve enough losses and pay too much for a few cars and call enough plumbers and get hurt in enough relationships to learn some things that masquerade as correct answers. And maybe you seem calm in the face of what appear to be disasters, and that gives you the confident air of someone who knows you can turn to page 54 in the Big Book if you need to.
But you can't. You're just winging it with the same resource everyone else is using: The Big Book O' Life's Experiences. Sometimes you're lucky and have someone you trust around who can tell you things they've learned by living. And maybe you're drawing wisdom from a Biblical-level of guidance that helps you answer some of the biggest questions (like "How should I live my life?"). But mostly you're left to just wing it on the endless details life throws your way.
To make your winging it easier and perhaps more effective, my Big Book O' Life's Experiences recommends:
- Don't stop learning. Ever. Pay attention. Always. If your place floods and your stuff gets wet because you didn't know what to do, paying attention means you'll know what to do next time. (Like, you'll learn how to turn off the water main and start sopping up the water with every towel, sheet, and blanket you can find while you wait for the plumber.) Learn how to hang a picture, rewire a light switch, and understand a lease. Dumber people than you have figured these things out. So google and YouTube and keep learning.
- Cultivate a group of smart people you can turn to for help, people you trust who have more experience than you, and, ideally, some common sense. You're not in this world alone, so don't try to be. Find some handy people and some people who understand relationships and people who know you well.
- Have some faith in yourself. You're figuring it out day by day. Hard times that challenge us and frighten us are wonderful places of growth. And they're the things that help us shape our own answers one day at a time.
- And that's the key: As you live and struggle along like everyone else, you're writing the closest thing you'll get to a handbook on life. And as Anne Lamott tells us in the quote below, it--along with the people around us, the faith we have, and the hearts we cultivate--is enough to get us through.
"It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox, full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools—friendships, prayers, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough." (Anne Lamott)