You Can Always Learn Something New
Learning is essential to living.
For many people, the idea of lifelong learning is unappealing. They think that after formal schooling is done – whether that concludes with High School, college, or something vocational – they need not learn anymore.
While the classroom setting ceases to be the primary place for education, learning is essential to living. There’s one very simple reason for this truth: Because change is the one and only constant in the universe.
Everything changes. You change. I change. Animal, vegetable, mineral, it changes. That’s because everything moves through phases. While the entirety of the universe is based on energy, that energy is constantly in flux and flow. That’s change in action.
Because of the constancy of change, new things must be learned. Many of these we don’t label as learning. Instead, we adapt, alter, shift, refocus, realign, and so on. When you regularly wake up with stiff joints, you learn how to stretch or use a cream or pill to help loosen them up. If your job starts using a new app, you learn it so that you can keep working.
Learning of necessity is one thing. Choosing to learn is another. The choice to learn can make a huge difference in your life. That’s because choice is the key to self-awareness, self-sovereignty, autonomy, and living life the way you desire.
Choice and mindfulness
Classroom education tends to focus on facts and figures. Important dates in history, the how-to for math, the basics of reading and comprehension, and so on. But more than that, it’s often about teaching groupthink and how to be a cog in the machine.
This is in no way an attack on teachers. They’re not the problem. The problem is a system designed to do the minimum on a shoestring budget in order to make people capable of contributing to society. All the system cares about is readying the masses to join the workforce and follow norms and standards of the time.
I was fortunate that my teachers instilled a love of learning in me. They saw my creative nature and encouraged me to build on it. They fostered my curiosity and endorsed my individuality. For that reason, even after I left school, I still sought out new ideas and new things, both tangible and intangible, to learn.
Over the years, I’ve come to see how important choice is. Not choice from a passive place, but active, conscious choice. Practical mindfulness is active conscious awareness of your inner being and making choices and decisions that work with who, what, where, how, and why you are. But when you don’t engage with your conscious awareness, this is easy to lose.
Learning how to be mindful is not something anyone in formal education settings will teach you, save probably psychology and philosophy. But you can always learn something new.
Choose to learn something new
One of the great tragedies of the MAGA movement is how their collective fear of change is being exploited. Rather than encourage people to learn something new about the world, the administration uses their fear to drive them into working against their own self-interests. Sorry, MAGA, but Mr. Trump has openly called you stupid and makes it clear daily that he doesn’t give a fuck about your job, your family, or anyone but himself. But I digress.
It can be hard to accept change. Especially because the majority of change is utterly outside of your control. Shit happens, but so do good things. Life can change instantly, but it also shifts slowly and inexorably every day. While your visceral, immediate reaction to change might be something hugely negative when it occurs, you get to choose after the initial reaction how to roll with it.
That means you might need to choose to learn something new. That might be temporary or permanent. After I got hit by a car crossing a street, I had to learn how to move around in a wheelchair. In time, I had to learn how to move about with a walker or crutches. Eventually, I had to relearn how to walk on my rebuilt leg. To do all of this required me to learn something new.
It was a choice I made. I pushed to accelerate my recovery. But this also applies to intangibles. I learned how to meditate to be more mindful and actively, consciously aware of my thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions. That helped me find better balance and more understanding of what makes me tick. This led me to be more centered and even-tempered, and allowed me to follow my life-long love of writing and to make more of that.
This can be challenging, however.
Real and artificial limitations
Yes, elections are often a choice between bad and worse. But making the choice is what matters most here. Make no choice, you have thrown away your voice and your power.
It’s bad enough when you do this with the outside world. What about when you don’t empower yourself with choices and decisions? Before long, you find yourself unhappy, confused, uncertain, and wondering how the hell you got there. When you cede your choice to rote, routine, and habit, and live subconsciously, you disempower yourself.
Lots of our so-called leaders prefer this. Why? Because people who are on autopilot are easier to direct and influence than those aware. Why else would anyone label being “woke” as a bad thing? The opposite of awake and aware is asleep and ignorant.
To be fair, there are both real and artificial limitations for people. I know, for example, that as a middle-aged, white, cis-gendered male, living in a relatively affluent suburb, I have more privilege and readily available options than a young-adult, black, trans-gendered nonbinary person living in the middle of a struggling inner-city neighborhood. Both of us, however, can become mindfully aware of our thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions, and make choices and decisions about ourselves from there.
Artificial limitations are those that suggest any intangible is lacking, scarce, or limited. All intangibles are abundant. Hence, everyone everywhere can learn something new and use that to make choices and decisions for their life experience. Empowerment comes from within, and learning something new is fuel for your inner fire. Learning is essential to living large. Learn something new, kick ass, take names.
The choice to learn something new is yours to make.
Choosing to learn something new isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that learning is essential to living, you can make choices to learn something new, be it a tangible skill or intangible idea. Knowing that change is constant, and you can learn new things to help work with change, you become an active participant in your life and open the way to deciding who, what, where, how, and why you are.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The better aware you are of yourself, here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-thirty-third (633) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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