Things No One Else Can Teach Us

Life has a peculiar way of teaching us its most valuable lessons through the experiences no one can warn us about adequately. We can read countless self-help books, attend seminars, and seek advice from mentors, but some truths can only be understood through our own trials and tribulations. The wisdom that comes from heartbreak, failure, loss, and unexpected triumph cannot be transferred through words alone—it must be lived, felt, and integrated into our very being.

This exploration delves into those profound moments when life becomes our teacher, revealing insights that emerge only through personal experience. You'll discover how temporary nature of everything can become a source of both terror and liberation, transforming our relationship with loss and gratitude. The journey will illuminate how knowing yourself deeply changes everything about how you navigate relationships, career decisions, and life's inevitable challenges. Most importantly, you'll learn to reframe failure as education, understanding that every setback contains seeds of wisdom that no classroom or conversation could have planted in your consciousness.

There was a friend whose presence in my life I had taken completely for granted. Boomerang was the kind of person who showed up to every event, reached out regularly just to check in, and genuinely cared about connecting with good people. While I was busy networking and chasing career opportunities, measuring every relationship by what it could do for my ambitions, he simply wanted to hang out and maintain friendships.

When Boomerang moved to South Korea to teach English, our final conversation was brief and casual. He asked to meet up before he left, but I was focused on my work projects and promised to catch up when I returned from a trip. "I'll hit you up when I am," I told him, but I never did. A few weeks later, he suddenly collapsed at home, fell into a coma, and passed away. There were no second chances, no opportunity to make up for all the times I had prioritized everything else over simply being present with a friend who valued our connection.

This devastating loss taught me that everyone in our lives is temporary, including ourselves. The uncomfortable reality is that any interaction with a friend could be the last, but this sobering truth also provides the best motivation for treating people with more care and attention while they're still here. We chase ambitions and focus on what we don't have, spending less time appreciating the people and experiences we do have. The irony is that we're not happy with what we have, we won't be happy with what we get either.

Learning to appreciate temporariness isn't about living in constant awareness of death—it's about recognizing that the people we love won't always be here, so we shouldn't deprive ourselves of their presence simply because we're caught up in wanting more of other things. Since Boomerang's death, I've set reminders to reach out to friends every fifty days, and I schedule hangouts in my calendar because if something isn't scheduled, it's not a priority. This has slowed down my output slightly, but what am I working toward if I have no one worth sharing it with?

She had the most dangerous eyes and spoke with such assertiveness that meeting her felt like every idealistic young man's dream. Our relationship was built on shared rebellion—different countries, languages, and faiths—and every decision had to be an adventure. She was fearless, getting fired from jobs for talking back to superiors, always landing on her feet with something more interesting and exciting.

When we fought, the intensity was unlike anything I had experienced. She would say devastating things she didn't mean, leaving me in tears trying to figure out how I had messed up so badly. Hours later, she would console me and explain she hadn't meant it, except for the times when she did. Our first breakup broke me completely—I stayed in bed for two days, unable to imagine continuing to exist without her. She was all I knew, and when she left, so did the life I had dreamed about, along with my self-worth and enthusiasm for the future.

A wise colleague sat me down after witnessing my prolonged pity party and delivered some hard truth: "The world doesn't stop for our tragedies; it keeps moving, and we have to keep moving with it. Stop handling your tragedies like a child, and deal with them like an adult. Adults show up for work, children stay in bed." When she finally ended things permanently while teaching in South Korea, I channeled that advice and went to work the next day, having a productive day despite the pain.

This experience revealed that we can survive far more than we think we can. None of us knows how strong we are until being strong is the only option we have left. We spend so much time avoiding discomfort that we don't realize our best selves emerge in those uncomfortable situations. The colleague's words became a guiding principle: there's always a day after the bad news, and we have to keep going to see it. Fear keeps us in line, but the moment we realize how much we're capable of enduring, the fences that hold us back start to disintegrate.

What started as a simple grocery shopping trip turned into an internet phenomenon that taught me profound lessons about embracing the unexpected. When I brought home greenish bananas, my friend Lilly was shocked—she bought yellow bananas and tried to finish them before they turned black, while I bought them green and let them ripen over the week. This moment, captured in her vlog for millions of subscribers, sparked an endless debate that continues to this day.

Initially, being known for green bananas rather than my creative work felt diminishing and frustrating. Every piece of content I shared would be met with banana comments, and when people recognized me on the street, it was about the bananas, not my art. I felt like I was being reduced to a sideshow clown while working hard to be recognized for meaningful work. The situation triggered deeper insecurities about my progress and the value of my creative output.

Instead of running away from the attention, I decided to run toward it and embrace what was happening. I started the hashtag TeamGreenish and began playfully engaging with the banana debates, sharing pictures whenever I bought bananas and comedically referring to green things as yellow. This shift transformed what felt like a setback into an opportunity for connection. People who engaged with my banana content also discovered my other work, and the debates made me more accessible and relatable as a person rather than an abstract artist.

The experience taught me that fighting against unexpected circumstances often costs more energy than embracing them. Our problems aren't always our fault, but they're always our responsibility. When we're buried in stress and insecurity, even minor situations can trigger major explosions because they represent the last straw on an already overloaded system. The key is identifying the bigger stresses that magnetically attract smaller ones, addressing root causes rather than just reacting to symptoms.

On a fourteen-hour flight to Hong Kong, I found myself seated next to an elderly German woman who had been waiting for me to wake up so we could talk. As a retired flight attendant who now traveled to Asia to train others, she possessed an energy and wisdom that immediately captivated me. When our conversation turned to her childhood, she revealed that she was a Holocaust survivor who had been separated from her father and sent to internment camps with her mother when she was around six years old.

After sharing stories about freedom and discussing the activism close to my heart, she offered a perspective that would later be carved into my skin as a tattoo: "Freedom is having nothing to lose." She explained that people find true freedom when they have nothing left to lose, when they decide to risk everything for their liberation. The oppressed become free not when they ask for freedom, but when they take it, even if it costs them their lives—because in that moment of decision, they've already achieved freedom.

This profound insight hit me during one of the lowest periods of my life, when I was broke, betrayed, heartbroken, and contemplating giving up entirely. Her words helped me realize that hitting rock bottom actually represented ultimate freedom—freedom to do anything and everything I wanted because there was nothing left to lose. I became free to be Humble the Poet authentically, even if only for a short time, because living authentically for a brief period was worth more than fifty years of being anything less.

The moment we decide to learn from our losses, we no longer feel them or fear them. Once we're free from the fear of loss, we're free to discover ourselves and live our most authentic lives. This perspective transforms every setback into an opportunity for liberation, every failure into a chance to shed what doesn't serve us. True freedom isn't about having everything—it's about being willing to lose everything in service of who we really are.

The most profound truth is that wisdom cannot be borrowed or taught—it must be earned through the currency of personal experience, pain, and authentic living. Life's greatest teachings come disguised as heartbreak, failure, loss, and unexpected detours that force us to confront who we really are beneath our carefully constructed facades.

Start treating every relationship as temporary and precious, knowing that appreciation in the present moment is worth more than any future achievement. Embrace your failures as expensive education rather than evidence of inadequacy, understanding that each setback contains seeds of wisdom that prepare you for what's coming next. Most importantly, remember that freedom begins the moment you have nothing left to lose—not because circumstances strip everything away, but because you choose courage over comfort, authenticity over approval, and growth over safety.