Learning Challenges and Failing Less

In my opinion, it's really hard to separate out one kind of learning from another, when it comes down to it. Life is horribly messy, and all of its parts are invariably intertwined--each affects the others. It's become more and more clear to me, as I move forward through college (and life outside of college, as mythical as that sounds sometimes), that the reason I feel like I've had a lobotomy at the end of every semester is because I've not only learned the subject material provided to me to the best of my ability--I've also readjusted all the knowledge I had before the semester. I've filled in gaps, or (hopefully) corrected inconsistencies, or even smashed a couple paradoxes together into a dubious-looking lump. But knowledge isn't limited to what you learn in school; it's the sum of everything you've ever experienced. So the headache I have is really the result of me revamping my entire perspective on life, the universe, and everything--all in the space of sixteen weeks. It's like an extreme renovation project, where at the end I have a house that may be vaguely familiar but may also look nothing like when I started. It may have the same layout and foundation, or it may not. It may have more doors and windows, or it may have less. It really depended on what that semester was like.

This is a really roundabout way of me explaining that I don't really think about--or conduct--learning in the categorized terms of the HEART model. But I'll try to parse things out a bit.

Firstly, we'll talk about the things I'm bad at. It would come as no surprise to anyone who knows me on a more than hey-I-know-your-face basis if I said that time management is not one of my strongest skills. In fact, I will come right out and say that I suck at it. But I'm slightly less awful, this semester, than I have been in past semesters--and I hope to get even better by the end.

When I procrastinate, I've discovered, I'm really just listening to the fears in my head, telling me that things will go wrong, or that I'll suck at something, or that doing the thing I want to do really won't be as good as it sounded in my head. Now, I know these fears aren't logical--and there are actually very logical statements that I can repeat to myself that help me dismantle these doubts completely. In fact, I've been repeating them to myself nonstop for the past week, to great effect. My favorite of these statements (or questions, really) is So what if things go wrong? You can fix wrong, followed closely by Will you ever know if you don't try?No, of course not, and What could you be doing right now if you'd allotted more time to work instead of worry, and finished earlier?

I try not to ask that last question too often, though, because the answer is usually Well, dishes, or More schoolwork--or, my favorite, Calling so-and-so about *insert boring, routine reason for phone call here*. Because I've usually been procrastinating about the phone call, too!

Of course, I've also put quite a lot of work into others of these categories. For instance, I'm great at reading. I read when I'm happy, when I'm sad, and whenever and wherever there is reading material available. No written text is safe: watch out, ingredients lists! Beware, doctor's office pamphlets! Run, poem I stumbled across online!

Ahem. It's good to have variety.

But I can't talk about reading without also talking about empathy. Because the best kind of reading happens when the words get absorbed into your blood and bones and you carry them around with you for the rest of your life. It happens when you come across new ideas, and new people, and new places. Because once you've read something, you can't un-read it. It's with you forever. And you can take those new ideas and people and places that you didn't have before and use them to interpret the world around you. When you empathize with a person, you are, in a way, deciphering their own personal language (spoken and unspoken). How can you do that if you have no experience grasping ideas you've never seen before? Or putting yourself into another person's head, full of their failures and triumphs; their hopes and dreams? Reading is an amazing way to teach yourself these things, and I try to indulge in the meaty, question-raising kind of reading at least once a day, to keep myself sharp. To keep myself thinking about what people besides myself might be feeling. I'm not saying that empathy doesn't seem like an impossible task, sometimes, because still fail--often. But reading helps me fail less.

And I still fail less at empathy than I do at time management. So I'm working on that.

We'll leave this post on a Gandalf note, shall we?

(Learning Challenges as explained by Gandalf. Quote: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." By Eugenio Hansen, via Wikipedia Commons)