I went for a walk with a friend today. We talked about friendship, about how we learn the skills to build and nurture the connections in our lives. She lamented that the people she knows who seem to know the most about how to do friendship well report that they learned it over many years, with trials and errors, slings and arrows, and all the messy complications that arise in life. They learned it, in essence, the hard way.

Later, I was voicing my frustration with my inability to share the valuable skills that I’ve learned and attitudes I’ve developed with the people who could benefit from them the most. “I can’t teach things if I don’t even know how I learned them!” I declared, despairing. But these skills and attitudes weren’t just built from facts and formulas, I realized after thinking it over for a while. They’re things that I learned through experience. Over time. By doing them for myself, figuring them out myself. They’re not communicable bits of knowledge, but the wisdom of heart, of mind, of body.

Much as we might wish it, sometimes there is no ‘easier way’ through to the things we want to cultivate, the skills we want to learn, the strengths we want to build. I can’t hand anyone else my wisdom. I can only learn to listen without trying to fix, and watch with them through the struggle as they discover their own. Learning to listen is in itself one of my struggles. Someday I’ll get it right.