Curiosity and Planning

One often gets this idea that all learning needs to lead to something, and usually that something is unrealistic: for instance, the study of law will make one a top criminal lawyer. Is it always the case that 'success' is defined by the highest position one can imagine, or is there a more subtle success that arises from learning?What I notice is that whatever one is studying, there are these deeper things one is learning, and these things extend beyond particular professions or roles. but I begin to wonder, has anybody really sat down and studied what these intangibles really are? In my previous blog entry I alluded to 'focus', but I also want to say that learning can make a person certainly more curious and flowing into a process. Curiosity --well, has anybody ever done a study on the actual experience of curiosity? Here again, my mind reaches a blank.
   Curiosity takes courage. I am looking at next year and am wondering, where is this study really taking me? I don't know the answer, and it is scary to sometimes fathom that there is no master plan in life. Even when people spend many hours, weeks or months, planning out what they are going to do in maybe five or ten years, even tomorrow will be different. It's not to say that planning is useless, but that the value of planning is more in the sense of engagement than in the outcome. To plan is to commit to the idea that at least in theory, one can really make sense of some things in life. Even if this theory proves to be wrong, perhaps it's better to have some kind of tentative plan, and work out the details (or itinerary) as one goes along. But if one is not too sure what the next step will be, that is when one can resort to curiosity: the desire to know or study what is not known.