Life Sucks, Then We Die: Education and Transformation

PAUL SUTHERLAND has days when he feels like life sucks and then we die, but he works to transform those negative emotions into positive, virtuous actions.

YEARS AGO, Spirituality & Health queried our readers about what they wanted. Transformation was the common answer. A simple word like transformation attracts a lot of nuanced definitions. When I went deeper into this idea of transformation with my meditation group, the conversations bounced around a number of themes and ideas. What did our readers want to transform anyway? Themselves? The world? Others?

And those questions led us to the big question: Why? Then the conversation moved on to changing consciousness, happiness, enlightenment, not feeling depressed, living a life with meaning and purpose.

Most people in the meditation group were financially okay, well-read, thoughtful, and self-aware. Eight thousand miles away, when my family and I lived in Uganda as part of my work for Utopia Foundation, I asked people what they wanted. The consistent answer was education, mostly education for their children. The adults seemed to feel that upgrading their own skills through education was a ship that had already sailed, but for their children they saw education as the way out.

Education is the groundwork that causes transformation. Education for the sake of results means practicing and applying what we learn. Education that is for transformation and not just entertainment requires practice. It takes work and commitment and can be challenging. Education requires us to let go of naïve beliefs, to explore, to inquire, to question everything, to be humble and innocent, but mostly to do the scariest thing we can do: Change.