For sure! I have always been a dedicated learner. From complicated subjects such as quantum physics to simple subjects such as the etymology of words, anything new to me has always been grist for my mental mill.
A lot of this desire to know is innate. I tend to think most of us are born with such a desire — all you have to do is watch a baby explore his new world or try to answer a toddler’s non-stop questions, to realize how true that must be. I’m not sure why so many people lose that interest, nor am I sure why I retained mine. Well, I do know two reasons — one is that I have always spent so much time alone, that there was no one to quench that desire to learn. Another is that when I was very young, everyone seemed to know so much more than I did, things like names of streets and the different shapes of leaves, which left me always trying to catch up.
It turns out that the reason they knew more was that they could see. I still remember after I got my first pair of glasses, I was looking out the car window in total amazement, and then I saw . . . street signs!!! And I realized that’s how everyone knew so much more than I did — they could see.
That realization didn’t make a difference, though. I still learned as much as I could as quickly as I could so I’d catch up, but I only ended up tormenting myself. I was one of those weird girls who read her school books the first day of school and then sat there bored out of her skull the rest of the year. So my learning came outside the classroom from any books I could get my hands on. (I wasn’t as fanatic as my brother who read the encyclopedia from cover to cover, though I did leaf through them — and the dictionary — and read what interested me.)
Somewhere along the line, perhaps because of the Taylor Caldwell books, I discovered there was a whole world of history we were never taught, and that gave me another area of study. And then, of course, there was health, writing, traveling, and so many other subjects that encompass the whole of the world.
Today, I keep my learning to gardening. It’s more of a hands-on kind of learning — trial and error — rather than book learning, but still, it’s learning. Come to think of it, though, I do spend a lot of time learning about the current state of the world, though I tend to think that subject is going to end soon since there’s nothing much I can do about any of it. But isn’t that the way of learning? Much of what we — or rather I — learn is simply learning for learning’s sake.
I suppose eventually, I’ll mostly be beyond this learning stage, not just for current events, but all subjects — though since my desire to learn has lasted decades, perhaps not, but still, there comes a point in almost every subject where I reach the end of what can be known (or what I can know, anyway) and then there’s no real point in going on. For example, I no longer am as fascinated by particle theories as I once was. It seems that particles can be broken down further and further until they reach a point where they no longer act as particles but as waves. So perhaps everything comes down to thought waves, brain waves, all sorts of waves. And if, in fact, everything exists as a possibility until it is “seen,” then that sort of makes learning less about finding out what exists and more about creating what might exist, which, to me, is pretty much a dead end.
Anyway, that’s more about my desire to learn than you ever wanted to know, but there it is.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One
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