Eleanor Roosevelt on Learning
Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren't they? There is no experience from which you can't learn something. When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense. And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
You can do that only if you have curiousity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge cased on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fears and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.
- Eleanor Roosevelt, Hyde Park, 1960
You Learn by Living, Eleanor Roosevelt
One of my favourite questions to ask my friends is, "What did you learn this week?"
I have noticed over the years that most of the answers are the lessons of daily life and personal interaction. I was thinking this morning, as I reread this quote, that while our daily experiences certainly offer excellent learning opportunities, I don't think it's kind of learning that keeps us vital and inspired and curious in old age. That kind of experience and learning comes free and fairly passively to anyone who's paying even the remotest attention. You don't have to seek it for it to arrive.
So I started thinking ... what question best frames a more specific kind of learning? The kind we go out and seek... the kind that keeps our brains humming and vital in old age ...
I think I have it but suggestions are welcome ;>
What did you attempt to learn or understand this week?
You can do that only if you have curiousity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge cased on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fears and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.
- Eleanor Roosevelt, Hyde Park, 1960
You Learn by Living, Eleanor Roosevelt
One of my favourite questions to ask my friends is, "What did you learn this week?"
I have noticed over the years that most of the answers are the lessons of daily life and personal interaction. I was thinking this morning, as I reread this quote, that while our daily experiences certainly offer excellent learning opportunities, I don't think it's kind of learning that keeps us vital and inspired and curious in old age. That kind of experience and learning comes free and fairly passively to anyone who's paying even the remotest attention. You don't have to seek it for it to arrive.
So I started thinking ... what question best frames a more specific kind of learning? The kind we go out and seek... the kind that keeps our brains humming and vital in old age ...
I think I have it but suggestions are welcome ;>
What did you attempt to learn or understand this week?