is there a manual i'm missing?

i often wish that i'd been given some kind of manual on how to approach life. i think back to when i was going to college, etc, or even the on-the-job training i got when i started at adp...and the whole gist of it was that if you couldn't remember information, you still had the book in which the information was written--idea being that you could just go back and re-read the answer, refresh your memory.

but life in general, and how to deal with it, is all stuff that you're supposed to have memorized.

from day one--your behavior towards parents and other people--it's all supposed to be ingrained, something that you don't have to worry about accessing.

sometimes, like today, i hear dan on the phone w/ a friend and he says, well, who knows what's going on...and my immediate thought is akin to "where's the instruction manual for the dvd player?"

who does know what's going on? everyone has a different take on it. everyone has a different perspective. there is no one way to approach anything in life. by and large, it's all based on what you experience day to day. either you learn from it and you keep walking with that knowledge embedded in your brain, or you leave it by the wayside.

but i think generally most folks glean what they can and add to their repetoire. you start out with a lesson on how to deal with someone who's afraid of spiders and you take away from that how YOU deal with spiders, or how to cope with phobias, or something. you forget what to do when someone around you is afraid of spiders; you take from the situation whatever it is that your brain decides to.

so therefore, i feel like i'm missing a manual. i've taken from my life experiences certain things, certain ideas and morals that are my backbone as i wander along. but i often wonder if the knowledge i'm schlepping with me is the knowledge that was intended, or if in some way i have warped the original teaching.

i think back to reading epictetus and marcus aurelius, and how they were focused on the same thing--the philosophy of living, the ideas that shape your life, and how you can shape your own journey. now how diluted has the original idea become--how over time and word of mouth and translator bias even their ideals have perhaps been tilted.

of course, that is taking an epic amount of time into perspective. at the same time, if i compress that time, i think about my own little notebook about how to live my life that's filled with haphazard scribblings, words strung together like a beads, grammar knitted. it's a scrapbook in my mind of how i think other people should be treated, when i should laugh at jokes, why i should reach out my arms and hold someone, and when.

so who does know what's going on? who knows what's best? who knows what's right, wrong, who wrote the manual for life, and in what language was it written? am i missing it, or am i carrying it around, unknown because it is merely thoughts and behaviors that i learned from every relationship i have ever been in? every encounter i've had has left an imprint on my psyche, something that is indelible and more hardy than ink, but changes daily, water warping wood.

is it me? is the answer within? is the answer without--does someone else have the manual? do i peice it together, like the rest of the planet? or do i just have to look through folders and boxes until i come across it, lost when i was younger, translated from english into spanish, korean, german and greek?