As the mailbox is filled with shop folders promoting the latest in School Fashion, the summer holidays are just around the corner. In my day, you know, last century, we started looking for agenda's, notebooks and pens mere weeks before school was about to start again. Apparently, there just so much to choose from, we have to start looking months in advance. It doesn't affect me, but it leads to another subject I wanted to talk about.
Learning.
Yep, I said it. How much did you like to go to school when you had to? And, admit it, be honest, how much did you long back to those days once you started real life?
Real life, I call it, as it's such a stark opposite to the mythical days in which maths was the bane of our lives, or even when writing a 30 page paper on The Idea of the Self in Modern Literature (modern, as in early 20th century Modern) seemed like an unclimable hill. The days of sleeping in when a class was cancelled or sleeping on the bus for an hour while whizzing past traffic on the way to uni.
We may not like to admit it, but we all learned skills in school, or I wouldn't be writing in English here. Graduation comes as a relief from all that learning, and we vow to never go back. After a certain period of being a computer drone, we may, just "may" be ready to challenge ourselves again. Maybe you start learning a new language (hello Spanish, long time no see, como estas?). If we're that kind of person, we start 'expanding our self' to become more aware, or if we're honest, we jump headlong into a quarterlife/midlife crisis of our own making. African dancing, Jembé or pottery, while all having their own merits, call up an image of a certain kind person. If we're still being honest, and lets say that we are, we all have the image of a slightly voluptuous lady of a certain age who likes the sense of natural fibres close to her skin and who dies her hair with henna when we think of African dancing, Jembé and pottery.
Now, if you could let go of these projections and look at the idea itself, we might see something else. We live in a time of affluence. Most of us don't have to spend the larger part of a day on finding food and shelter. This leaves us with time to let our minds wander. And with that time come the questions.
Imagine having to live hand to mouth. Would you care what colour to paint your bedroom walls? Probably not, because asking and answering that question wouldn't make your stomach rumble any less.
When we live on a small budget, we let ourselves be led by our budget when we decide on the colour scheme of our bedroom walls. And most of us do. Only when we can afford to pick whatever we want do we have to ask the question:
What is it that I want?
Inevitably, this leads us to question if what we have is, in fact, what we want. E presto, a crisis has magically appeared.
Some will turn to materialistic things to answer that question and compare the merits of one portable device against another until they see blue in the face. Others, let's call them our earth mothers, might enter a course of African dancing to bring them closers to themselves.* Whatever you do, do something that fits you.
I fit a toy wheel around a piece of dowel rod, and attached some fibre to the hook i screwed into the top of it. Eventually, that led to this:
During the 2010-2011 school year, I thought myself how to spin.
Next year, I'm learning how to play the Oboe. Neighbours, beware.
Are you challenging yourself?
* or fencing, or race car driving. Why not?
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