Moving the Needle

 

 

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

This week I spent a day learning a craft I’ve been curious about for a while. From a friend who has taught me several crafts and shares a passion for crafts and learning. It was a rich experience; a day spent in learning and sharing, exhausting every resource I could give and recording every resource I got.

Aside from the interaction, it was also a day I got to move the needle on my learning goals for 2022 and my life learning goals in general. This class had been on my to-do list for years. I started planning for it ages ago, bought the basic equipment I would need, found videos to start me off and created a playlist on YouTube, bought a how-to book and even taught myself some of the basics. Then I slacked off and the plans and stuff started gathering dust. Meanwhile, there has been a little bug in my brain that goes off every time I dust off the equipment and I quickly silence it.

This year, I finally came to terms with the fact that time waits for no man (or woman). And I went through all my bucket-lists culling those things I know I will never actualize because their time is passed and rethinking those things that are still possible. For those that remained, I went a step further and asked myself how I wanted to get them done and by when. This particular class was one of them. Initially I had lofty ideas about where I wanted to take the class, for how long and what certifications I could get out of it. I ended up asking myself why I wanted to learn it and realized I don’t really need all those frills I’d thought up – I just needed the basic knowledge of how to go about it and the rest would be a matter of research and interest.

And research and interest are 2 things I am never short of! For every craft I have tinkered with, I have a propensity to start afraid and very unsure of myself then take on small challenges and before I know it, I’m scaling mountains that leave me baffled as to where the confidence came from. Maybe I’m just curious or perhaps I have a dare-devil streak in my DNA . . . you never know. But the point is, if you don’t do something about those things you are curious about, you will forever remain curious and some part of your brain will never be settled because there’s unfinished business in your subconscious.

Have you been puzzling about how it feels to bungee jump? How to reverse a trailer? How to make yogurt? How the yogis fold themselves into a pigeon pose? Someone out there has done it and they have been generous enough to put themselves out there as teachers to anyone who is interested to learn. Some of those classes are online for free or at a small fee – what is stopping you from putting your curiosity to rest? No learning in life is ever wasted and some of the things we learn in life become the foundation for a whole lot of knowledge that we can then pass on to those around us and make this world a better place just because we learnt and we taught.

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” ~ Socrates

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