Man I love learning stuff. I love waiting for the click in my brain when I'm reading something I don't quite get. When you push a little bit and then figure something out you get to have that little burst popcorn kernel all to yourself forever, a little flower of comprehension to snuggle up to. Mmm mmm love it.
I frequently put down my learning, however, after the initial bloom of comprehension. Sort of goes along with my being pretty-good-at-a-whole-bunch-of-stuff-but-not-meaningfully-proficient-at-anything-at-all.
Why is this? I mean I do believe that depth actually is breadth and through the former you can achieve the latter, and following the thread of god through any discipline or body of knowledge takes you through the source of all. Iyengar says this about love - that dedicating our love to someone is our entry to universal, divine, unlimited love. Yep yep yep sure totally on board.
Ah but putting this into practice means choosing something to follow all the way down its rabbit hole, and I don't feel I've done a ton of that in this lifetime. I think I tend to figure out the baseline rules or concepts so that I know just enough of what is happening to see where something is going, and then I sort of get off the bus. So now I'm 32 and I have a bunch of things that I can do pretty okay and enjoy pretty okay but nothing that I feel I've followed so far afield that it's brought me back home. I'd like to buckle down a little but it's hard to choose what (to my three readers: I've written about this before so if there is a repetitive blogging apology to be made consider it made).
There is toughing it out involved. When the learning curve is super high in the early stages of learning about something, it's pretty thrilling to start to see the pieces put themselves together into the whole. But then there's the plateau. Sigh, the inevitable plateau when you know what's going on but don't know what to do next to make it feel like you're still on the ride. After that the feeling of progress is infinitesimal and at the same time the jump to the next plateau is further away. This is the point in learning that I usually move on.
Well no more! Kind of. We'll see. I think I have three things about myself that I really feel like I want to follow all the way down - under "meaningful work" in my criteria for happiness. My music-playing, yoga stuff, and a bit of philosophy reading that I want to know more about. Feels manageable. Whoops I'm totally forgetting my other little projects like brushing up on my Latin and working on my collages. But this is the problem - the desire to do so many things (breadth) just makes doing anything (depth) impossible. This is the problem with constantly trying on new selves. It never goes anywhere anyway, you are always just you afterward.
And the vanity issue is troubling, too. Experts are so intimidating and special and magical. It would be neat to be seen as an expert on anything. And my own sense of pride and credibility and self-worth is tied into how hard I work on any one thing (which is usually not that hard). So I'm looking for that feeling as well. Not too bodhichitta of me. Mergh, bleh.
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