3 Short Lessons About What Life Gives Us

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Self-improvement and self-help books usually contain some incredibly valuable lessons, and I remember one from a poem that I’ve seen in several of them. It’s called “My Wage” by Jessie B. Rittenhouse, and that will be the subject of our lesson today.

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“My Wage” by Jessie B. Rittenhouse

I bargained with Life for a penny,
And Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store;

For Life is a just employer,
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have gladly paid!

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I’m sure you were able to understand the lesson that Jessie has been trying to teach. Life gives us what we ask of it, therefore we shouldn’t limit our dreams. There’s another very famous quote that illustrates that lesson and you can find it in the bible:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”

— Matthew 7:7 (ESV)

We know there are no invisible genies granting all our wishes so we don’t ALWAYS get what we want when we want it, but the lesson still holds true. In life, most of what we get will be based on the decisions we make and the things we aim for. 

It’s never 100% accurate, but we usually get what we want. Just think about your career, your current salary, the clothes you wear, the places you travel to, the food you eat, and most other things in life. For most of them, you wanted them at one point, and so you went out to get them.

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3 Short Lessons About What Life Gives You

1. We can’t choose EVERYTHING. 

We can’t choose our parents, we can’t choose where we were born, and we can’t choose our circumstances. For those, we can be either extremely lucky… or extremely UNLUCKY. Life is definitely much easier if you’re born in the top 1% richest families in the world and you have everything handed to you on a silver platter as compared to being born in some nomadic tribe in the jungle or desert and you can’t find any food because of climate change and the destruction of nature.

Still, although life won’t usually give us exactly what we want, our little actions and decisions, day in and day out, shape our lives to the way we want and deserve it to be.

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2. We have to EARN what we want.

“[Life] gives you what you ask, but once you’ve set the wages, why, you must bear the task.“

“You must bear the task.” Life is not a genie but an employer, and like any other employer, they will only give you your wage once you’ve EARNED it. It similar to how animals in the jungle still need to hunt and scavenge for food in order to survive. We will only earn money, riches, good health, and almost anything else we want IF we work for it. 

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3. We can CHOOSE to do better.

“…once you have set the wages, why, you must bear the task.”

The poem’s lesson is sound, but that part just doesn’t sit right with me. If we use our careers as an example, we set our starting wages at first, but eventually we get pay raises and promotions, and we even more to better positions in other companies.

We must always remember that we don’t need to put a cap on our earning potential or put a limit on the kind of life that we want to live. After all, if people didn’t dream of better things and if they didn’t do their best to create the kind of world they want to live in, then we’d all still be stuck living in caves and mud huts in the jungle. 

We don’t need to stay at the level we started (unless we choose to), and we can always dream bigger.

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Whatever happens, whatever our circumstances, we can still choose our actions, and our actions determine our results. Depending on our circumstances, it can either be incredibly easy or incredibly difficult to achieve the things we desire.

Either way, all we can really do is try our best whatever happens. Aiming for success despite the chance of failure will always be much better than just sitting around and wallowing in despair.

Who knows. We might just win big.

“Your past doesn’t determine where you can go. It only determines where you start.”

— Source Unknown

That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed today’s lesson! If you want to learn more, just check out our other articles here!