By Chris Condon
As a long-time educator, I’ve always advocated for being not only an active learner but a “life-long” one. It’s good for the mind and body to seek out and cultivate the “new” – say, the new hobby, or vacation spot, or sports activity. Yet too often it seems that once we have set a goal to acquire the new, we encounter a kind of resistance, a voice in one’s head that says, “Well, I’ve never been a gardener… I used to play tennis, but… I tried playing the guitar, only I gave it up when…” The inspiration loses its spirit and seems to dissolve into thin air.
Or does it?
Our minds are a beautiful thing – a miracle, really, that reveals a sensory world in continual flow. It’s astounding that we can open our eyes and see the morning light, or hear the songbird outside the window, or feel the warm blanket against our skin… All of it is new; we need only awaken to it. In fact, if these sensory phenomena were assigned a color and seen on a movie screen, an explosion of radiance would appear, energy and information flowing in all directions, rivers of color and light.
Even more amazing, alongside this illumination of sensory experiences, our conceptual minds endlessly create thoughts, ideas, insights, and so on. Taken together, the sensory and conceptual are continually in flux, always moving, exploring, experiencing, understanding. This is our uniquely human illumination – the life of sensory revelation on the one hand, and the life of conceptual brilliance on the other. Fused.
Seen in this light, being a life-long learner isn’t so much setting fixed goals and accumulating more skills, whether new or old. Rather, it is allowing the flow of energy inherent within our lives to carry us along in new directions, leading us onto paths that will appear in the right way, in the right time. The Irish clearly knew this, as can be heard in their blessing from long ago: “May the road rise up to meet you,/ May the wind be always at your back,/ May the sun shine warm upon your face,/ and the rain fall soft upon your fields.”
