5 Words That Changed My Life

LIFE LESSONS

5 Words That Changed My Life

Spoken by a stranger I’ll never meet again

Photo by Alexey Demidov on Unsplash

I was at the bus station when it happened. A guy had just barged in front of me, and instead of standing up for myself and saying what I thought, I stood there feeling powerless. That was my way back then. To smile and pretend that everything was ok even when it wasn’t.

As I got on the bus, sat down, and put my headphones in, a man standing outside caught my attention. He was holding up a note that he’d just scribbled down. It read:

Your triggers are your teachers

If his eyes weren’t full of as much compassion and love as they were, I would have thought he was mocking me. But they were, and I felt seen and heard in a way that I hadn’t before.

I didn’t get to say thank you. The bus pulled away seconds later. But he must have seen how frustrated I still was, even if I tried as hard as I could to hide it.

For the rest of the journey, I couldn’t get his words out of my head. The idea of someone teaching me things about myself after they’d just hurt me wasn’t normal back then. I hadn’t read the likes of Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Brené Brown, and Gabor Maté. Things used to happen to me and I would react. That’s as far as it went.

That day, however, was the first time that I asked why. His action didn’t warrant my reaction, but he touched a part of me that believed I was weak and powerless. So I was catapulted to a time in childhood when I was living with my dad. He was a drunk back then, and oftentimes, his anger would spill over. I wanted to shout “Stop! It’s enough,” but I just sat there and swallowed my words as I saw things I shouldn’t have seen.

Realising that a simple interaction can lead to a deep understanding of myself changed my life. It was the beginning of my wanting to repair the relationship with my dad.

He has been one of my greatest teachers and is now a dear friend. But I had to see everything that he did as an opportunity to grow instead of a source of pain. I had to move from a place of powerlessness to a place of empowerment.

A lot of that was about letting go of the anger I once carried and speaking my truth. It was a slow process, and one that was full of confusion. But every time I got angry or hurt, I started to ask why instead of blaming others. And the more I asked, the more I learned.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Carl Jung said. So even irritating people like the guy in the bus station who barged in front of me can bring things up from the deep that might not be accessible without them.

They can be annoying as hell, but I now try to use those moments to figure out what’s going on inside of me. And it pretty much always dates back to a time when I was much younger.

In that way, there are teachers everywhere. It’s one of the reasons why ancient texts like the Tao Te Ching say, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

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