Yes, there will always be something new to learn.
As you are reading this, I am attending a medieval reenactment event.
During said event, I am dressed in medieval garb for 7+ days, living out of a canvass pavilion, and going largely offline during this time. (Still need to reach people around the large campsite via text and like means).
One of the best things about reenacting the vast time period covered by the organization – spanning about 1000 years) is all the ugly parts that we no longer must contend with.
The ugly parts largely involve lack of sanitation, safe food, various creature comforts, and somewhat ironically now (post-2020) the plague and deep class divisions.
The point is, in the over 400 years since the time period my organization reenacts, society has collectively learned an almost surreal amount of information. We’re gotten exponentially better with sanitation, food safety, and disease management (mostly).
Given how little changed during the 1000 years or so that my organization covers, this is incredible when you give it any real thought.
From 600 BCE to 1600 BCE, learning was a slow burn at best. For another 300 years, it accelerated slightly. Then, for the past 100 years or so, it sped up almost immeasurably. And even after this accelerated learning – we have more new things to learn.
This is not just applied to our society at large. It is much more readily applied to you and me.
We are always learning
I know that sometimes this feels untrue. Yet it is the truth. We are always learning.
I am almost 50 years old. Every decade, the number of things that I’ve learned have been amazing in retrospect. What I knew at age 20 that I didn’t know at age 10 is hard to gauge. Likewise, what I knew at age 30 was considerably more than I knew at age 20. Thus, nearing 50, all that I have learned over 5 decades is quite a lot.
And yet – there is more to learn.
This is true for everybody. And while we can actively pursue learning – sometimes we learn by passive and unplanned experience.
Things happen that we didn’t anticipate nor expect that impact us and teach us in some way or other. Though it may not feel that way when they occur – I find they largely provide lessons and opportunities to learn.
When I got hit by a car crossing the street at the end of 1999, I suffered numerous injuries. The recovery was an often painful and unpleasant experience. But the main takeaway for me? I learned so very much. I learned all sorts of things about the human body, the mind, the spirit, potential, and possibilities. While it was an awful experience overall that I would not wish on anyone else – neither would I take it back and not have had that experience.
Why? Because of all that I learned from it.
This is an example of passive learning, really. So, what about active learning?
Always something new to learn
Let’s begin with several important truths:
- There are nearly 8 billion people on Planet Earth.
- This galaxy has 100 thousand million stars.
- The 40-hour workweek as we know it now came into being in 1926.
- There are 206 bones in the human body.
Why do these truths matter? Because you may or may not have known them before – but you can learn them. No matter who, what, where, how, or why you are.
Choosing to learn something new depends on what category the information you learn falls into.
What do I mean? Consider these 4 categories of things to learn.
- Things we need to know
When I am writing fiction, particularly some of my sci-fi, I need to know some of the actual science behind certain ideas. Astronomical distances, the current theorems of faster-than-light travel, and ideas like dark matter, antimatter, and so on. If I want plausible science, I need to learn about these things to one degree or another.
So, I actively seek and study information so that I can learn more about these things.
- Things we desire to know
Watching something on TV with my wife the other night, an actor looked really familiar. Where had I seen her before? I decided to look her up in IMDB.
Ah, right, she was in that movie. Cool.
There was no reason for me to learn this – but I had a desire to know. So, I took a moment – and learned. How might this serve me? It might not. Although, it could come up in a game of trivia or some such.
- Curious facts just because
I love random trivia. And sometimes I look things up just because I desire that random information.
Also, I have retained many facts I’ve learned over the years. And there are always new, random things to learn. Just because.
- Things we don’t need or desire to know
There is so much information in the world today. And thanks to the internet, there’s at least a little to be learned about anything and everything we can conceive of.
But let’s be honest – there are lots of things we don’t have any need to know whatsoever. Or no desire to know. And let’s face it – there is an almost endless stream of things available that we can choose to learn. Or not.
Why does learning matter?
Learning is how we continue to grow and evolve.
I rather believe that one reason to stay alive is that there is more to learn. So many new and wondrous things. If we desire to gain more knowledge and information – we can learn more new things.
I think that this ties very much into my creative side. Because as I learn and grow, my art grows, too. The writer that I was when was 9 years old is not the writer I am now at 49 years old. Much of this was because I have chosen to learn new things – and that has led to even more things to learn.
For all that we collectively know – there is so much we don’t. And even what we know is subject to change. For example, once upon a time, we believed the sun revolved around the Earth. But we learned that the Earth revolves around the sun instead. Common knowledge now was blasphemy at one time.
Yes, there will always be something new to learn. And that means that no ending is ever truly the end. Why? Because of all else that you and I can still learn.
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