Have you arrived at the point in life where you realise that every new lesson you learn is one you’ve learned before?
Here’s what I’ve discovered: There are no new lessons under the sun. (There are even fewer at midnight.)
I’m sure I’ve arrived at precisely this same conclusion many times before.
I’ve always known better than to repeat the mistakes I keep repeating, and yet that’s never stopped me. For example, I know better than to overeat simply because I’m appeasing my palate instead of listening to my appetite. I’ve already learned that to hit the snooze alarm “just one more time” will create a frantic morning because of the poor decision to start my day by delaying the very act of entering into it. I’ve known both of these things since, oh, 1971 and yet I’ll rediscover them, as if by magic, every six years and make their full eradication my goal.
It doesn’t happen. Yet I keep finding great pieces of wisdom, and on each new occasion I greet them with a genuine “A-HA!”
We play this kind of game with ourselves in various arenas. We’re meant to follow the “trending” (a non-word I refuse to employ without quotation marks) hot-topic methods of organising our homes and offices. We’re meant to become minimalist and efficient.
Yet new “life-hack” (also always in quotation marks) tips, such as never letting a piece of paper cross your desk twice or donating to charity clothes you haven’t worn in more than one year, uncannily resemble creakingly ancient methods of efficiency.
Recent books on decluttering your home repeat, in more lyrical and Zen-influenced language, the essential points of articles your grandmother read in a 1952 issue of Good Housekeeping titled “Mess Causes Stress!”
But it’s the bigger issues that keep me circling in a fixed orbit, permitting me the illusion that I’m making progress (I’m moving, after all) while reminding me - as I start to see familiar landscapes reappear - that I’m back to where I started.
Not much has changed since I was 17. Oh, I sometimes convince myself that I’ve evolved, but that’s mostly because my faults and my hopes have been upgraded, updated and intensified. They remain essentially the same as they were in high school (a fear of abandonment and a desire for approval) and the lessons I continue to search for are iterations of what I first almost-but-never-quite learned decades ago.
Happiness is neither elusive nor unobtainable. I arrive at this conclusion about every two years. Apparently I can absorb lessons for brief periods without acquiring mastery over the subject matter.
Or let’s say I congratulate myself on fully grasping the hard-won concept that certain relationships are unsustainable. I do this as regularly as some people plant bulbs.
I’ve had to re-accept, at those fortunately rare times when it happens, that even long-term friendships, if undermined too often by distrust, envy or selfishness, must be permitted to die a natural death. Somehow, however, the task always seems new and the wound always feels fresh, as if I’d never gone through it before.
But I’ve learned that if somebody only calls to ask a favour, or to tell you that you didn’t live up to his or her expectations, or offer ungenerous judgment masquerading as advice, then it’s just fine to keep that individual from crossing the velvet ropes dividing the outer world from your inner life.
Finally, I need to be reminded every few weeks, if not every few days, that while we’re not responsible for what life offers us, we are responsible for what we are willing to accept.
I first learned that lesson as a kid from reading W C Fields, who said: “It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” Even before I knew what Fields really meant, I knew the words meant something; I recognised the latent wisdom underlying the humour.
Most new wisdom is an echo of what we already know.
But you already knew that.

- Gina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut, a feminist scholar who has written eight books. She can be reached through her www.ginabarreca.com