cedar_grove | Look Ma, No Hands!

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

To arrive at understanding from being one's
true self is called nature. To arrive at being
one's true self from understanding is called
culture.
--Confucius

-Center yourself, and as you breathe, look over your life and try to discover whether you are more natural or cultural in how you learn.

For physical things, I think I learn naturally – I find it easier to remember something if I can do some kind of action while learning that can be brought to mind when trying to repeat the processes. Then again, I am quite cultural in some way too. I observe, I process in and attempt to understand and I try to 'mimic,' but here's the thing. I don't think either works in isolation from the other… because me personally, I end up getting bogged down in being afraid to make a mistake (which is definitely something I have come to from a cultural angle).

The number of times I've told my students, 'It's okay to make a mistake. It's part of learning,' is really… well it's too many times to count… and yet I will go out of my way to avoid mistakes, why? Because they make me seem stupid, useless, unreliable – fill in the negative adjective as you'd like. The older we get, the more we come to that way of looking at things, sadly. Cultural understanding, (or maybe that should be conditioning, or expectations) makes us afraid to try and be able to learn naturally… where yes, we might fall flat on our arses, but hey, at least we tried.

It's like ice skating… no seriously; bear with me, this story will make sense.

Before a couple of Christmases ago, I'd never been ice skating before… no particular reason; I'd just never had the opportunity. Mir took me ice skating and it was a hoot, a lot of fun, but I was singularly rubbish at it. I didn't care… I was having too much fun… I was being too child-like to worry about how foolish I looked tottering around on the ice, falling on my backside… and hanging onto the wall to avoid falling. As much fun as I had, I did do a lot of falling and in one of those falls, I hurt my knee… actually I did a good job of hurting my knee, but again, I really didn't give a flying tinker's cuss because I had enjoyed myself so much. That's what pain killers and anti inflammatory drugs are for, right? By the end of the session, I was pretty much able to skate all the way around without falling down. Yay me! And I learned to do it by doing it… naturally. It was only when I stopped trying to watch other people or remember what I knew from reading about skating or whatever, and got out there on the ice and did it, that I was able to learn to do it at all. Next stop… skydiving… um… no. (I really am kidding on that).

Incidentally, I want to go skating again; maybe this year… we'll see… there's just one thing. I know it'll be fun, but I'm scared of hurting my knee again.