Learning life: Four lessons I learned about learning
As I hit enter and the Tableau workbook surfs through the air and optic cables making its way to my manager, it marks my first major assignment at my new job and culminates in my first month at the firm. My thoughts drift towards the magic of learning. To understand why we have to go back a couple of years. What started with learning entrepreneurship in an MBA institute, snowballed into amassing more than 15 different skills, learning everything and anything that my brain could dig its neurons into. I had rediscovered the taste of learning and I had no intention of stopping till I licked the bowl of knowledge spotlessly clean.
When COVID hit and my city was placed in a lockdown, I decided to take things up a notch, studying and reading everything I find intriguing at a pace of an ADHD college grad on a cocktail of Adderall and Ritalin. Over the still-ongoing quarantine; I have taught myself Spanish, Urdu, guitar, keyboard, yoga, cooking, gardening, Python, SQL, Google Analytics, Google Ads, SQL, Kotlin, Android Studio, drawing, story-writing, fermenting, Tableau, Google Colabs, Garageband…you get the point. I assimilated these skills for the same reason that I listen to music; not to gain anything except perhaps pure, unadulterated joy. Not because it completes my CV but because it completes me.
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”
— Henry Ford
This is where my new job comes in. Learning code, I chanced upon data science at the beginning of the lockdown and knew immediately that this was something my brain wanted to swallow whole, even though it would add to me in no conceivable way being an entrepreneur and Management Accountant by qualification. I could not be more wrong. That is predominantly what landed me my new job. The founder was on the fence when it came to my hiring decision and what nudged him towards the right side (pun intended) is the fact that I knew Tableau, Numpy, and Seaborn.
During this extended learning spree, I have learned some lessons about learning.
Lesson 1: Life is a school and each day, a lesson.
Each day is an opportunity to learn, as long as you are open to the opportunity. Each day will bring lessons, new and old, banal and original, consequential, and trivial. Do not scrutinize the lessons, your opinions are irrelevant in any case. Be grateful that are alive and have the opportunity to learn. Never ever stop learning. Work your brain till it nearly short-circuits with neural electric activity; the same way you work your muscles and till they are swimming in lactic acid.
Lesson 2: Learn only that which calls out to you
Gravitate towards that which pulls you like water pulls the roots of a plant. Listen to the lessons that call out to you, let them guide you, and drown out all the other noise. Do not think, do not ponder, do not wonder. If you listen, you will know your song. You will know it much the same way you know how to breathe, to pump blood, to digest food, and heal scars. You will know it just as water knows how to flow.
It is life that is calling out to you through these lessons. Life is searching for you through every lesson. By showing your willingness to learn, you make yourself available to life and available to new dimensions, experiences, opportunities, and avenues. Look all around, life leaves you clues and hints all over the place. Serendipity, fate, destiny; call it what you will. If you choose not to learn and grow, if you choose to ignore all that calls out to you, you end up missing all life. You are being shown you the way but you would much rather pull down your notification bar or click on those shopping ads like a coke-addled monkey screaming for some more white powder.
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
― Dr. Seuss
I believe it to be true because my belief comes from the only source of true knowledge (if ever there is such a thing), experience. What started as a fascination for coding climaxed into my first job after the MBA. I got that, much like I got this one, not because of what I formally learned. I got that because I knew Python and it was an ed-tech startup teaching coding to children. That job landed me on a two-month work-trip which lead to the resurgence of my chronic disease. It took from me 12 kilograms of my self in return for lesson three.
Lesson 3: There are no mistakes, only lessons
Often in life, you will scale the mountains of learning and reach the peak of your knowledge only to realize that the peak was a plateau all along. Out there in the distance stands another mountain, imposing and formidable, challenging you. The only way for you to see through this disguise, through the facade is by making mistakes. Mistakes are the teachers of life. Mistakes expose the honeycomb-like holes in your knowledge. Being correct adds little to your knowledge, if at all. Mistakes bury you under a heap of knowledge. This is why you can always be certain when you are wrong but will always be left doubting if you are right. Every mistake is a lesson not learned, a lesson retaught.
The chronic condition had reemerged in my life because I had not learned my lesson. It had relapsed because I was going backward, falling back into the same behavioral patterns and addictions that had cascaded into the chronic condition in the first place. It compelled me to learn more about that which would show me the way, Ayurveda. It made a mockery of the depth of my knowledge, revealing how much more I had to learn. I realized I had only scratched the surface of Ayurveda. I was determined, this time around, to split apart its nucleus. This attempt at fission would lead me to Virechana and lesson four.
“By seeking and blundering we learn.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Lesson 4: A lesson is repeated until it is learned
You do not move through lessons in life in a straight line like you conquer levels in a video game. You move in concentric circles as if diving deep into the singularity of a black hole. You find yourself running along similar paths all your life albeit in different directions. Learning identical lessons in different contexts. Discovering and digging deeper into the rabbit holes of the same truths. Observing the same thing but perceiving it differently every time around.
This brings me to Virechana, a punishing but reinvigorating Ayurvedic treatment, it was my desperate attempt at healing my ailing mind-body. Physically, it cleanses the blood, liver, spleen, and intestines. Mentally, it cleanses everything that you should have left behind.
“There are patterns which emerge in one’s life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Chosen
It is not for the chicken-livered or pigeon-hearted, requiring days of preparation wherein you which culminates into the actual procedure on the final day. On that fateful day, as you detox through a series of explosive expulsions, tar-like mucus that smells like a horde of rat corpses fermenting out in the sun leaves the body. Through every bout of the purge as my body was laundered, so was my mind. Emotions tumbled out of me faster than an egomaniac extrovert on ecstasy. After round four being a near-knockout, I bawled. I could now see clearly that the mind and body are not separate from each other, they are each other.
The line between the two was no longer blurred because there was no line; there never had been. There is no mind and body. There is only mind-body. The distinction is solely in my mind, a funny dilemma. Virechana was akin to a psychedelic experience without psychedelics. Before I possessed knowledge but then, I was possessed by it. Before I knew of it but now I know it.
It takes time to recuperate from the Virechana treatment. It shreds you to pieces so that you can put yourself back again. It burns you to the ground so that you can rise from the ashes. It leaves you weak and writhing in pain so that you can heal. I have chosen the worst time for the treatment in hindsight, it has been absolute hell and I am ever so grateful for it. In my country, the monsoon is underway, the season Ayurveda believes that the body is at its weakest and the atmosphere is rife with instability and disease.
Throughout the rainy season, my weakened body has suffered every time the weather has thrown a tantrum. I can feel every bit of weather-fluctuation in my muscles, my joints, my mind, and my intestines. I now understand this is because I am as much a part of the environment as it is of me. As a star is a part of a galaxy. I extend out of it as a branch extends from a stem. Where I end and the environment begins is only a distinction perceived by my senses and conjured by my head.
Every lesson is repeated until you have learned that which is being taught. These two lessons were repeated until they were learned until the experiences were well and truly earned. Mind-body and environment are now one.
“No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.”
— John Locke
As I practice the keyboard, for the pure delight that pressing keys rhythmically brings to me, inspiration reverberates in my ears. The lyrics of the song I am learning help me yank out the words from the character in my science fiction novel; something I have been struggling with for days on end. I have finally found the lines and he has finally found his words. Perhaps this is because I am learning and opening myself up to new avenues. Perhaps this is life finding me. Providing me a helping hand with some light lifting right now because I am willing to learn to do the heavy lifting without it.
