Learning from Everything

 My reflection today is that if anyone knew exactly what happened outside the home, nobody would ever need to leave home. The mind and all its contents would be completely predetermined. Think of it this way: education would be about simply recollecting what a person already knows. This would be very much like Plato's dialogue Meno, where a servant boy learns how to 'recollect' the shape and dimensions of a triangle using a mysterious and innate pre-knowledge. But in actuality, there is so much that a person cannot know unless they venture to learn from other beings and even risk the uncertainty of new and unexpected moments.
    Even the case of education is an interesting example, If all education is were simply a kind of reading of specific manuals, then eventually there could be a pill that you would swallow that would contain the information. You wouldn't need to digest the information, if that is the case. But what happens is that people integrate information in very different ways, and there is something surprising and infinite in all of that. Another way of looking  at it is to say that learning takes place on a complex matrix of hybrid possibilities. If I approach each situation with a very fixed view of what I am going to learn, I will be chained to that particular agenda, and not open to learning from the unexpected event.
    I recall reading years ago from a book by Samuel Delaney called Motion of Light in Water that as young man, Delaney would look at books and think of what they could be about, only to find that upon reading them, they turned out to be the opposite. Delaney's conclusion from this is quite contrary to what we would expect: he felt that the original feeling one has about what the book might be about is more important than what it 'is' about. Why is that? I think it's because the more we spend time with a book, the more we are inclined to try to understand its totality or its single underlying meaning, rather than seeing the book's possibility: where it could have been different, what sub-themes or detours could have been explored from a different lens, etc. It is as though there is a tendency to try to cover over one's curiosity as the book reaches its completion and forget the original intrigue of the book itself. Another way of saying this is that the promise of a situation (or a text) can often be more revealing of oneself and one's desires than the actual 'delivery' of such a situation or text.
   If I become fixated on 'conclusions' rather than possibilities, I lose the sense of wonder that a book or a chance meeting can offer. But most of the time, schools teach people to make conclusions rather than to notice their own curiosities. The whole process of essay writing seems to encourage 'wrapping up', 'distilling' , packaging and organizing information into neat bundles, rather than seeing the loose ends that make life an endless (pardon the pun) puzzle. So in this way, I think sometimes one needs to go back to being a child who explores rather than concludes and distills, or who picks up something without having to finish or end it in some way. Perhaps this creates a different possibility for learning in general.