Keep Learning
“The point is, if you don’t keep learning, then you might as well stop writing because you’re just stuck in the past somewhere. And you better keep learning your whole life.”
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Long, long ago, I abandoned a Master of Arts degree in English and American literature, lacking only one seminar and the writing of my thesis. I left the work incomplete for an assortment of good and bad reasons, none of which matter here, and as chance would have it not a single opportunity has ever been withheld because I lacked that degree.
Nonetheless, in the decades that followed I often grieved the limitations of my education. Not the abandoned degree. Never that. Instead I craved more depth and breadth than my time as a student had ever seemed to offer.
I longed, not to be seen as “educated,” but simply to know. Within myself. For myself. I listened with awe and admiration to those filled with a knowledge I had only touched at its edges. And oh, how I wanted more!
I once heard a professor from the University of Chicago speak about what was then, I believe, a new humanities degree, a program that combined literature, history, philosophy and theology. I was so enthralled with the window he opened into an education I hadn’t even known possible that I had to grip my seat as he talked to hold myself back. That’s how fiercely I wanted to abandon my life and my then marriage to follow him.
All that was long ago, though, and much changes with age. (Beyond digestion and memory.) But one change in particular I have come to appreciate. I no longer ache when I encounter an education that outstrips my own.
I am still filled with awe and admiration, of course. But these days I can listen without longing to possess. If, though, what I’m hearing speaks deeply enough to my heart, I no longer grip my chair to hold myself in place. I leap.
In the past decade I have spent months and years immersing myself in topics I never before considered mine. I’ve read about quantum physics, about the origins of our universe, about the history of climate change. All territory I’ve never touched before.
Again and again, I am intrigued, compelled. Again and again, I struggle to understand.
Yet I go on struggling. I go on reading.
I read and read and read.
And I reread.
I highlight as I read.
I make notes that get lost.
I print off internet articles until the printed pages pile.
I set each book and article aside and move on to another.
Sometimes—often—I forget what I have read.
(How grateful I am for the safety mechanism in Amazon that tells me I already own this book when I attempt to buy it again!)
And then, somewhere on the other side of this enormous jumble of information, after months of reading and sorting and asking questions of Google, I sit down to write.
Because that is what I do with the contents of my brain, whatever they might be.
And because it is only in searching out those few words capable of clarifying my new enthusiasm to the very young that I will know, finally, whether I understand anything at all.
So while I still admire profoundly that wider, deeper education I never acquired, I no longer envy those who did. Because I’m too busy taking a totally new kind of education on board to bother. Too busy piling my brain full then amusing and frightening myself observing the spillage.
After which I carry my new understanding, such as it is, to the page.
All this requires struggle. Of course. I could hardly be more poorly prepared for the education I now pursue. I never even took a science course in high school beyond sophomore biology.
But I have discovered that opening myself to these new worlds brings certain delight.
And it is because of that struggle—and that delight—that, even in my ninth decade, this good work of writing still fills and energizes my days.
