My cousin Wanda is 99, still lives on her own, and her mind is clear and sharp. When I talked about school starting up again, her response was, “I wonder if I can still learn something.” The easy answer, and it’s a true one, is, “Of course she can,” but we don’t learn much by stopping with the easy answers. What is it to learn? The easy answer is, to acquire information, analyze it, and draw conclusions from it. Wanda does all that. She has mastered Facebook, which is more than I can say, and she deals directly with medical and insurance people about various problems. But that kind of learning, though important, is superficial. On a deeper level, to learn is to be born again, to become someone new. Our identity, our sense of what we are, is the eggshell that we must burst out of in order to be born. We become a self only by exploding the limits of a previous self.
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September 20, 2024
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My cousin Wanda is 99, still lives on her own, and her mind is clear and sharp. When I talked about school starting up again, her response was, “I wonder if I can still learn something.” The easy answer, and it’s a true one, is, “Of course she can,” but we don’t learn much by stopping with the easy answers. What is it to learn? The easy answer is, to acquire information, analyze it, and draw conclusions from it. Wanda does all that. She has mastered Facebook, which is more than I can say, and she deals directly with medical and insurance people about various problems. But that kind of learning, though important, is superficial. On a deeper level, to learn is to be born again, to become someone new. Our identity, our sense of what we are, is the eggshell that we must burst out of in order to be born. We become a self only by exploding the limits of a previous self.