So Much To Learn When Learning Is Despised

No one has ever completed their apprenticeship. ~ Goethe

I love to learn. I’m a glutton at a never depleted feast.

It can’t be helped–I come from a family of learners. Tattered library cards, museum memberships and Time/Life book series were the playthings of my childhood.

Trees, wildflowers, tide-pools, music and books—I enjoyed a casual education in an era when children were benignly ignored, and no afterschool activities or frenetic attempts to polish a child’s resume choked off the creativity of young minds.

The message I was given was unmistakable: It’s good to question. It’s good to test assumptions. It’s good to explore new ideas. It’s good to change your mind.

Of this I am convinced: The desire to learn is God-implanted. The decision to stop learning is sin.

“The illiteracy of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,” Alvin Toffler wrote over forty years ago. How prophetic he turned out to be.

When we cling to past conclusions, or dig in our heels against the threat of new input, when we put a period next to a person, or a circumstance, or next to life itself and declare we’ve learned all we need to know, we start to die.

So Much To Learn

Life is engraved with the invitation to turn our periods into ellipses and with grace and humility examine our certainty as if there were other opinions besides our own….as if there are worlds we’ll never conquer….as if our dogma will always demand a fresh look.

What are you called to unlearn? Where is God inviting you

• to rewrite an ending,
• to re-look at a relationship,
• to question an assumption,
• to say out loud, “I may be wrong,”

to embrace a life of learning once more?

 

Photograph by Melanie Hunt