When I was younger I loved arts and crafts. I learned how to macrame, work with stain glass, and how to throw clay pots on a potter's wheel. One of my greatest life lessons came from my pottery teacher while I was working hard to save a pot that had started to wobble. I asked him what I should do. He unceremoniously smashed it and told me to start over. He told me not to work on something that was not working. He was not telling me to give up. He was simply saying that sometimes it's best to have a fresh start - to try something different.
Years later, I've found this to be true with much of life. If things are not working out right, try something different. It doesn't help to keep doing the same thing. Learning comes through experience, and experience comes through doing. If we want to learn something different, we have to do something different.
While this may seem obvious with somethings, it is not so obvious with others. For instance, if we keep becoming upset at others, we will never truly learn about others. If we keep wanting others to be like us, we will never learn another way of being. Also, if we believe that everything we know is the truth, we will never learn different truths. It goes on and on. Like the clay on the potter's wheel, we are shaped by our beliefs.
The good news is that we are mentally, emotionally, and physically fluid in nature. We only become rigid through our fears and our comforts - by what we like and don't like. If our likes and dislikes have set up a binary reality for us, we will live in a binary world of us and them, good and bad.
Living in a fluid reality, we are free to experience and learn from the moment, and learning becomes a natural part of life. We can then carry forward whatever we have learned that enriches our life. In that way, our life keeps expanding and continues to become enriched.
The is an art in learning to let go and experience another way of being. The good news is that we are all artists!