a love of learning | Bertram's Blog

Acquiring Knowledge

August 25, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it can thus drive out useless things and retain the good, for nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I certainly need to acquire more knowledge to drive out the useless things I’ve learned about how so many people are trying to destroy this country — not just the globalists and other international groups, but groups of citizens and non-citizens, politicians and judges, fraudsters and lawbreakers within our own country. Useless knowledge indeed since there’s nothing I can do so long as the elections in Colorado are pre-determined as they have been for the past couple of decades.

I’m not sure how to acquire more knowledge except by reading, and for the most part, I’ve read all the non-fiction I intend to, at least for now, anyway. I do have a small collection of alchemy books I inherited that I started to read, but they aren’t so much a history of alchemy as self-teaching books. The exercises all start the same: visualize something (that something varies from book to book). In one book, they explained how to change things: visualize your immediate surroundings down to the merest detail, change what you need, then merge the visualized world with the real world, and voila! Or presto! Or ta-da! Or whatever your preferred word is, and the world has changed.

The problem is, I can’t visualize anything. I am mentally blind. (The word for that is aphantasia.) So much for my becoming an alchemist.

There are, of course, real world ways to acquire more knowledge, mostly just by living. Recently I’ve learned that one needs a certain ruthlessness to be a gardener. For example, my petunias were getting long and leggy and producing few flowers, so I trimmed the plants way back and now they are blooming again. And I wacked the branches off an overgrown bush, so now I have an unattractive stump with lots of arms sticking out, but I can see green where new sprouts are coming up, so in another year, that bush will be small and attractive and evergreen.

Another real-life bit of knowledge I acquired (or rather reacquired) is that no matter how careful you are, there will always be some weird accident that brings you low. In my case, I had just pulled a cup of tea out of the microwave and carefully set it on the counter, but my fingers must have been entangled in the string of the tea bag because as I pulled my hand away, the bag sloshed out of the cup and onto the back of my hand. 200 degrees of heat is painful!!

I did what I always did with burns — slather it with natural vitamin E from a capsule, and when I still felt that excruciating burn, I iced it. That took away the heat enough that I felt fine. Whew! The weird thing is that it actually charred the skin. Turned it brown. Luckily, it’s healing well, even the bits that blistered, and I haven’t had any pain since those first few minutes. Even now that the charred skin is flaking off, there’s no problem. (And yes, I do know that brewing tea in a microwave is not the way it’s supposed to be brewed, but it’s a lot easier to brew one cup that way than with a kettle.)

Frankly, I can do without that sort of learning. Perhaps I ought to dig out my alchemy books again and try to see what I will never be able to see. That has to be easier than to damage oneself, however accidentally, in the name of knowledge.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in Adventure, books, history/myth, How to, life. Tags: a love of learning, acquiring knowledge, aphantasia, changing the world, dealing with a burn, learning alchemy, mentally blind. 2 Comments »

Learning Something New

May 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Daily writing prompt

How do you stay motivated when learning something new?

View all responses

This must be a question for people who are forced to learn things they don’t want to, such as for school or work or new technology, because otherwise it makes no sense. At least not for me. Learning something new has always been its own motivation. Now that I think about it, learning something new seems as if it is sort of the point of life. If we never learn anything new, where would we be? Lolling around in oversized cribs, I imagine, crying from sheer boredom.

The joy of learning is written in our genes. That’s obvious if you’ve ever watched babies, newly sprung from their playpens, crawling all over, learning new things, trying to pull themselves up. And oh, that grin of sheer pride and joy when they manage that first step. They didn’t need to stay motivated, the learning itself was the goal, though encouragement from their parents never hurt. Obviously, there are some things babies need to learn that perhaps they don’t want to, such as using the potty or not touching the pretty fire, but for the most part, babies learn because they want to. Because to them, learning is playing, and playing is learning.

There is an old quote: we don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing. I never liked that quote because it’s too specious, too simplistic, too out of touch with reality. Look at professional athletes. They have to stop playing because they get too old to be able to compete with younger players, not the other way around.

Now, if I were to substitute “learning” for playing, then that quote makes sense, though again, it doesn’t always hold true. Often the elderly can no longer learn because of growing cognitive issues, but still, I tend to think curiosity (and boredom) does motivate people of any age to learn new things. Besides, whether we want to or not, we have to continue learning as we age if only to learn how to do things we once did with ease but that now seem complicated, like opening jars or bending to pick something up. For sure we have to learn how to be mindful or else a reckless step can lead to disaster.

Since writing this has convinced me of the importance of learning — with or without a need for motivation — I’m sitting here trying to think what I’ve recently learned, but I can’t really think of anything. At least nothing fun. I learned a lot of fun things in the past decade — dancing, camping, buying a house, taking care of a house, the tarot, landscaping, gardening — but not so much today except for small things I learn while reading or gardening or doing puzzles. The only specific thing I can think of is that I am learning more of the history of the middle east than I ever cared to know. I never did understand anything of their history or who they were or why they did what they did — it was simply too confusing, uninteresting, and of no particular value to my life, but now I’m seeing a much broader picture, one that dates back almost to the first days of civilization, but specifically back to the 7th century. Is it important to know the history? Only if I want to know the historical reasons for a lot of today’s events, which I don’t, not really. But it is learning, so that’s good.

What I need is to find something new to learn. Something I want to learn just for the fun of learning, something I don’t have to worry about motivating myself to learn. Though what that might be, I don’t know, because if I did know, I’d already be learning it.