Learning as We Go #1
There are some things you come to learn in your early twenties. These revelations are perhaps not as well refined or quite as broad as those that come later, but they are deeper in the sense that they dredge much deeper in to the river of thought and memory. It is in their twenties that for most people things really start to make sense.
We pretend a great deal of knowledge and rebel against all authority that tell us they know better in our teens. Teenagers have the great ability to know that they are right and that their experience is unique. And actually it is true that they are unique, and they do know quite a bit; however, knowing things does not mean the parts are connected. Teens know a great number of powerful facts about the world; they just aren’t put into a system yet.
Imagine your car engine. The engine is a well crafted piece of precision mechanics. The insights your average rebellious teenager has are like taking this engine apart into separate pieces with gasoline spilled over the collection of parts. You have a lot of powerful tools and real chance for fire, but you still don’t have a working motor. The insights you gain in your twenties is the stunning realization that you have a bunch of car parts sitting in a pool of gasoline and that you really can connect the pieces. This is how I mean deep insight. The fundamental change in thought patterns that occurs when you stop collecting powerful thought and start putting them together. Later insights in life are reshaping parts of the engine, tuning it to work better, and adapting it to work in new ways.
What are some of these things you learn in your twenties? Let us take a look at piece one..
Your parents didn’t know anything about you.
As it turns out this assumption was correct. That’s right, all those teenagers screaming that their parents are completely ignorant about their lives are right. The realization though, is understanding why that is true.
Think back to those oh so fun times of raging hormones and anguish at trying to establish just who you are. In those memories are probably a lot of questions from your parents that you refused to answer. That’s right, they were asking and trying to understand the whole time, but you stopped talking. They didn’t know what was going on in your head because you shut them out. The reason? In most cases it is much easier to simply shut family out than to admit that you don’t know or are confused, specially when you are starting to learn that you can think.
Now dig deeper in those memories. The best part of this realization is that the reverse is also true. You didn’t know your parents. In all that trying to figure yourself out you forgot to ask the people who used to know you best about what was on their minds. Oops. Easy to play with gasoline and matches when you forget their are other people around you.
It is a good feeling to get that channel dredged. Remembering that your parents are people and that you can not only ask them about what they do and how they are is a great feeling. Especially because you realize at the same time you can ask them for advice and wisdom and understand how to begin using it.
Next time:
#2 – Learning about learning
