Every life is a struggle, but not every life is an education.

From Alfred’s journal

Two men on the bench by the hardware store this afternoon, both of them worn down to the same gray, both telling the same kind of story. The first one had been laid off three times and had worked out something about himself from it, which he said slowly, like he was still checking it. The second had been laid off three times too and told it as weather, the sky doing what skies do. I used to think hardship taught by itself, the way cold teaches a bird to crowd the feeder; it does not. Every life is a struggle, but not every life is an education. What I cannot see from the branch is whether the second man chose that, or whether nobody ever sat still long enough to hear him through to the part where he might have learned something.