Why I’ll Never Stop Learning
by Anna Luther
April 3, 2007 — Published in Accounts & Glimpses
No, not necessarily the kind of learning that comes from formal schooling. The kind of education I’m referring to is the kind that may or may not come out of books but probably doesn’t have a degree attached to it.
Recently, I was forced to confront a very real fear: that my brains would leak out my ear when I began my full-time day job as a proofreader of legal transcriptions. As perfect a fit as that is for the woman who freaks out at the casual mention of comma splices, I still feared that any higher knowledge I may have gained in the humanities, sciences, or (especially) the arts would vanish into the ether as soon as I joined the 9-to-5 world. I was terrified that because I wouldn’t be giving as much time to the “higher order,” I would never have use for it, or worse: that I would forget its very existence.
An Academic Devotee Reminisces
I adored college. I’d have burned incense at the shrine of academia if only I could have found a place to put a censer. I loved having academically passionate friends, colleagues, and mentors at my fingertips every waking moment. As much as it was about the people, though, even more it was about the knowledge itself. I was absolutely on fire for learning things. I keep considering going back to graduate school so I can have the opportunity to soak things up with intensity and passion and direction. My high school flute teacher, reminiscing on what kind of student I was, compared me to a sponge. “You absolutely soaked up everything,” she remarked. And I did! I was the same way in college. If there was something to be learned, I was there with bells on and a notebook in hand. If there was music being performed or rehearsed, I was there. Because I wanted to soak it all up.
I found a home in the hallowed halls of York College’s humanities department, specifically the professional writing program. Here I found peers and professors who thought deep thoughts and talked deep things. Through that program, I found some of my most cherished kindred spirits who continue to encourage and inspire me even as we move past our undergraduate years and into the wider world.
Why Do I Bother?
Broadening your worldview and your perspective on life. Isn’t this one of the primary points of education? Otherwise, you will simply stagnate at your present level of knowledge or ignorance. If you think that everyone in the world wears their hair in a mullet or only listens to early 90’s pop, you’d be sadly mistaken. However, if you’re not interested in being aware of what other people do, then you’ll be tragically condemned to a very narrow existence, or even to an unwillingness to improve and expand your mind . There is a real danger in becoming content with the things that one knows or does not know.
Education, in both the formal and informal contexts, gave me new reasons every day to wake up and say, “Thank you, Lord, for putting me here.” Every new revelation from a Bach fugue, every unconsidered point of Catherine of Siena’s theology, every dissection of sentence structure to consider word choice, placement, and meaning made me realize how very small a part of the universe I am, how many gifts there are around me to be thankful for, how very present God is even in unexpected places and things in life.
Life can be lived in one of two basic ways: the happy-clappy, contented, unquestioning, pond-skimming level, or the daring-to-dig-in-the-dirt level. Life and learning won’t always be happy or pretty. They won’t always even make sense, but daring to embrace them will be worth it because we’ll be progressing, in some way towards the Divine, towards the Fount of all wisdom and understanding. Everything we learn can lead us towards a better understanding.
Education gives me tools to move beyond that surface level in a quest for a deeper understanding of the things beyond this mortal realm. It teaches me to ask questions, to move beyond the surface level.
Even the Most Unexpected Knowledge Becomes Useful
And you never know when something you’ve picked up along the way will prove useful or even cause an entirely new understanding. In college, I took a class I thought I would never find use for: Language and Linguistics. When in my professional life, would I ever find use for a class that involved the way that human beings use language in different regions, through different media, and across genders? Will I ever find a use for the twenty-page paper my group and I composed on the uses of rhetorical propaganda in Russia’s pursuit of power? Most people just use language. But when would full-out analytical understanding of construction and hidden meanings in rhetoric really be useful to me?
While I haven’t found a use yet for Russian propaganda, I unexpectedly found regional dialectal knowledge most useful when I began working as a proofreader of immigration cases. All of a sudden, the way different regions to use verbs in mind-bogglingly varied manners and my comprehension of this became intensely useful, as was the understanding of where certain accents originated from.
Where Guitar and Life Intersect, There is Wisdom
Everything I learned and continue to learn makes me realize how much more there is out there to discover. Guitar lessons are my current exercise in humility. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is how very little I know. There is so much that I don’t understand. Every time my teacher bestows some new pebble of guitar wisdom upon me, I almost always respond with a question that further explores the concept, even though it is usually poorly articulated because I am just beginning to grasp the general idea. Everything that he tells me, I want to know why or how or what the exceptions are. And he patiently indulges me, offering as much explanation as he feels I can handle without confusing me.
Everything he tells me makes me realize how little I really know and how much more I want to know. “You laugh a lot in lessons,” he remarked once. And it’s true! I laugh at myself constantly because as much as I like to think that I understand about music (and life at large), I am constantly stumbling half-blind through things because there is so much more that I do not understand yet. My life and guitar lessons mirror each other honestly and completely: I stumble around to the best of my half-ignorant ability, but I am learning.
Everything that I learn there makes me wonder what other things are out there to learn. And that is how I look at education in general. New knowledge and understanding, whether imparted through schooling, friends, or new instruments serves only to fuel the fire, not dampen it.
You’ll Never Find the Answer Until You Know the Question
That is the whole point of education: to be able to think intelligently about the world around you, to be open to growing as a person, to ask questions and find answers, and then find that those answers are no longer sufficient, or perhaps that you weren’t really asking the right question to begin with.
This is really the most meaningful, enduring type of learning that can continue after college and the most effective and most profound: a willingness to be that sponge that continually thirsts, no matter how much has been absorbed. This is the kind of education you need to be open to, not just the formal kind that involves stodgy outlining of pedantic texts or that requires sacrificing ungodly amounts of money. Learning can begin there, but it cannot end there. True education is a willingness to recognize how little you know — no matter where you are in life — and a thirst to comprehend more and to grow. It’s a chance to be thankful for one more thing you never even knew existed and maybe even an opportunity to teach your fingers to dance a little more knowingly across that fretboard.
Illustration by Anatole Upart.
Anna Luther
Anna Luther is an obsessive musician-writer whose days are split between pondering the finer points of Bach and flogging verbose writers.
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