Was life planned before birth? What did you come here to learn?

I got a work-related email Thursday that made my stomach churn. It was from a client asking me about an issue I’d managed to avoid to avoid talking with him about. I knew he wouldn’t be happy with a decision I’d made related to his account — and I dreaded the day when I would have to deal with it. That day had come.

For a few minutes, I stewed in my unhappiness. I worried about how I was going to handle it. And then something finally clicked in my brain. I forced myself to ask the question I needed to ask.

“What is it that I need to learn from this?”

It sounds ridiculously naive, but for the last few years, that one question has saved me from a lot of grief. It doesn’t protect me from my own mistakes, but it puts me in the right frame of mind to deal with problems. But this isn’t some technique I learned from a book.

It’s something I learned from the experience of a woman who says she died briefly and visited heaven. It might sound crazy, but it’s been useful for me.

I’ve become fascinated with people who have what’s called a “near-death experience.” I first heard of these back in college, but I didn’t think much about them. They’re experiences had by many, many people who have reached the point of being clinically dead for some period of time — typically minutes — and then returned.

(I’ve mentioned before that my other had one such experience as a child, even though I didn’t think much about it when she told me.)

Some of these people can recount ethereal experiences they had while they were clinically dead. Although the specifics can vary, the quality of the experiences is remarkably similar. I’ve been reading and listening to people’s stories for several years now.

I’ve read skeptical doctors explain them away. And I’ve read counter-evidence that makes the skeptics’ explanations look laughable. I don’t claim to know for sure what’s going on, but I’m fascinated by it.

A lot of these people say that they discover while they visit “heaven” that they were living lives they had planned before they were born. It’s common for people to come back from such an experience with the belief that he or she had helped to plan the person’s current life on Earth, sometimes by agreement with God.

One of the common themes was that each person has come here to learn something or to grow in some way. A few years ago, I heard a woman tell a very vivid account of such an experience. Even though I can’t verify that anything happened to her, it seemed profound and it affected me deeply.

And then I realized something interesting. Whether it’s true or not, it could be a useful way to view my narrative for my life. If God had sent me here — and we had agreed I was here to learn something — what would this particular life be trying to teach me?

So that has become a common lens through which I look at my life. If I were living my particular life with the goal of learning something which had been planned for me before my birth, what are the lessons I should learn from what I am experiencing in this moment?

I’ve found that to be a life-changing question.

If I’m here to learn something, what can my life teach me? What can I learn from the things I go through, both the good and the bad? How can those lessons make me a better and more loving person? How can they make my soul just a bit closer to being what I was created to be?

Since I started asking myself these questions a few years ago, I’ve often calmed myself and found more enlightening ways to frame things I was going through. I still experience grief and pain and frustration and loneliness — just as I also experience happiness and joy and exultation and connectedness — but I interpret those things in very different ways now.

I see life as less of a thing which happens to me against my will. Even the things which hurt me deeply can be learning experiences. Framing the world this way has led me to think deeply about responsibility and patience and gratitude, as well as helping me to understand grace and mercy. Most of all, though, it has helped me to understand unconditional love — in a way I’d never seen it before.

I can’t say you would have the same results if you tried my mental and spiritual exercise, but I can say that it’s been very valuable for me.

I’m not yet the man I believe I was made to be, but by trying to learn from my hurts and fears, I think I’m finding ways to get closer to my goal.

Whether people who have “near-death experiences” are delusional or if there’s something spiritual going on, it doesn’t matter. They’ve taught me something. They’ve helped me to be a better man.

Above all else, they’re teaching me to be more authentic in my love for those who people here who I want so badly want to love.