Last week I bought a small microphone. Nothing complicated. A simple gadget that helped transfer my stage whispers and soft asides to the recording machine. When I opened the box, out fell an instruction manual as thick as a doctoral thesis.

There were warnings, diagrams, troubleshooting charts, maintenance schedules, and advice on what to do if the machine suddenly developed an emotional problem.

I sat staring at the booklet and wondered why life works exactly the opposite way.

A toaster comes with a manual and a pressure cooker comes with instructions but children arrive with absolutely nothing. No handbook. No operating guide. No emergency procedures.

No chapter titled, “What To Do When Your Three-Year-Old Decides The Living Room Wall Is A Better Place To Draw Than Paper.”

Marriage is no better. The wedding invitation is beautifully printed. The cake is magnificent. The photographs are perfect. The advice from relatives is endless. But nowhere does anybody hand over a booklet titled, “Marriage: Read Carefully Before Use.”

Imagine how useful that would be.

Page one could simply say, “You are both right. Please stop arguing.”

Life itself comes with even fewer instructions.

We are born, sent to school, pushed into careers, relationships, responsibilities, taxes, and traffic jams, and somehow expected to know what we are doing.

Most of us spend half our lives pretending we understand the mechanics of marriage, child caring, even nation building, while secretly searching for the missing manual.

But perhaps we are looking in the wrong place.

The truth is that instruction manuals do exist. But they are not printed on glossy paper. They are written in people. We learn from our parents. Sometimes we learn what to do. Sometimes we learn what not to do. Both lessons are valuable.

We watch the marriages of our parents, our uncles, our aunts, our neighbours, and our friends. Some relationships teach us patience. Others teach us what happens when patience leaves the building.

Even nations have manuals. History is the instruction book of countries. If our leaders opened that manual more often, they would discover that selfish ambition usually enjoys a brief period of applause before collapsing under its own weight. Unselfish service, however, continues to inspire long after the leader has gone.

History keeps repeating the same lessons because people keep skipping the same chapters as we are seeing now.

Perhaps that is humanity’s greatest problem. We own the manuals but seldom read them.

And when we do read them, we often ignore the instructions.

So the next time something you ordered on Amazon arrives with a booklet thicker than a novel, do realise, that what you are seeing are mere instructions on a piece of paper.

But all around, in your parents, your friends, your neighbours, and even your own mistakes are instruction manuals waiting to be studied.

Read them carefully, and discover that the answers you are looking for have been walking around you all along…!

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