Education and Experience

Examination is formidable, even to the best prepared; for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

There is no school equal to a decent home, and no teachers equal to honest, virtuous parents. This is how we live - by experience, intuition and advice; all of which we subconsciously merge together to form an intricate and complicated mindset, that which is our own. For many a century, it was all man had to live by, to face his decisions in a world of unexplored possibilities. They are my models for the practical man. But one has to argue: experience is an expensive tutor.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. Knowledgeable men are among the most revered today, both for their intellect and their uncanny ability to parade as walking encyclopaedias. These men, who have known little else but the realms of books, who are tutors in life lessons, are my models for the theoretical man, and have only these to allude to his eminence. But one might argue: education is merely a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Surely time is a test of trouble - for man has revolutionised himself from one extreme to another. But the observing eye would look for the point at which education and experience unite to form a culmination of sorts, which leads to successful decision-making. 

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. And in saying so, education is not water to experience's oil, but rather like a sharpener to a pencil. For in decision-making, the human mind would first explore the hard drives, or memories, and then apply knowledge to reason and rationalise to make a logical choice. Thus in the same way, education, when co-joined with experience, literally makes for sharper choices. Like white wine is to chicken, they are meant to complement each other, for life itself is educational.

It is for this reason, none can be the better teacher, for true wisdom is obtained in the coming together of both these forces: practical education and formal education. 

This is, after all, the well-balanced recipe for calculated consequences.

I Can't Think Of A Title

Today's post is about investments. Okay, no. Moving on...

How exactly are the different stages of development deciphered?
Paul Dirac once commented, "A person who has not made his greatest contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so." History is replete with stories of prodigies in both sciences and the arts. These people are renowned in society - but more for their exceptionalism than their ingeniousness.
But it is wise to acknowledge that the world as we know it was not borne of children.

On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course; what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. These people are ridiculed at the first attempt, because this is what society does. Society wants instant gratification, always.

Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and a trusting audience. Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can't but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there's nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the 'failures' will end up blooming? There isn't an obvious pattern to this.

This begs the inclusion of an age old battle: Education or Experience?
Ingenuity and talent as opposed to wisdom and mastery.

The effects of ageing on cognition, achievement, and creativity is a subject worthy of more research, but perhaps it is also important to note that ordinary late-life contentment is worth more than extraordinary achievement.
Not everyone is destined to be a mathematician.

It's A Blacked Out Blur, But I'm Pretty Sure It Ruled

Is it ever wrong to miss someone?
Revelations in the early morning.

I've always told myself that my solipsism keeps me from feeling anything for another person. Feelings are not real; they're not tangible.
But here I am, writing about missing him. I do miss him. Stockholm's Syndrome, perhaps? I felt like a prisoner, and he felt like my captor. But I was his world, just as he was mine. Is that really such a bad thing?

'Never regret anything that once made you smile.' I'm doing just that - remembering why I smiled. Katya would smile.
I thought I'd be over this. In fact, I'd never have thought it would even come to this. Is this my 500 Days of Summer? Perhaps I will move on, but I could never forget.
To some degree, I find solace in the fact that I'm sharing these feelings with someone, somewhere. Maybe he still hurts because what are now memories to me are experiences he's still living. He hasn't forgotten the smiles, or the whys behind them. That magic is somewhere. But there won't be a repeat of this part of history. At least not now. Perhaps after his 500 Days. Maybe we're just waiting to miss each other enough to return. Maybe we need never return.

What is this love I'm trying so hard to define? Is that what should matter? What I need to define is happiness. If I know what makes me happy, I will know what I love.

My point is: I love remembering.
Because when the flood of mixed emotions that a moment encapsulates are over, only the good ones remain. We've been self-healing all along. It's just too soon to have realised it.

Matter of Prepositions

Words are an extraordinary thing.
How easy it is to change our train of thought with a simple word replacement.
For example: 'I am scared of him...' as opposed to 'I am scared for him...'
I know good grammar has never been well-practiced among my counterparts, but for those who understand the difference, those two clauses have very different tones.
Who, in the example, is the proverbial bigger person? Many factors affect that conclusion, yes, but what does fear mean to the individual?
What does it mean to be afraid of oneself?
By what means do we size ourselves up to others?
How big a role does empathy play in how we feel about others?
This is what it means to be human - stuck between the instincts of our animalistic natures and our godlike state of mind; the teenagers of existence, again, still finding our place among others and within this realm we cannot escape.

Somewhere I Belong

I was fascinated at how lucid I could be in times of great distress and pain. Perhaps my subconscious was sure I was wanting the same thing.
I cannot yet imagine what it feels like to lose a child, but I assume the finality of death is better dealt with than not knowing how they're faring. I still believe we were put on Earth as a social experiment of great magnitude. We are all our own beings, fashioned from others, but yet an invisible bond holds us to each other in a way that we cannot quantify.
The same is not observed for other worldly creatures, which helps substantiate my notion of us not belonging here naturally.
This is the great war we fight - with the world, with each other, with ourselves: Is there anywhere we truly belong? It's why we wander, it's why we're at an unrest.
We're all looking for signs.
For something that could tell us we're finally home.

Purgatory

Someone handed me a flyer today. This was all I noticed:

Do you know that you will outlive the sun? Do you know that when the earth and the stars have all passed away, you will barely have begun your endless day? Once you are born, you will never cease to live. You will be alive eternally. Eternity has no end. This is a solemn and fearful truth. Where are you planning to spend it?

 Right now, I'm in purgatory.
I'd rather go to hell than be in purgatory.

Time

An average human life (so tempting it is to point out at every opportunity) is less than a thousand months long. One third of those months are spent asleep, so a conscious human existence averages about six hundred months merely. A lifetime is thus a truly fleeting thing, lodged between a sleep and a forgetting; and there scarcely seems time to draw breath in it, before its last breath is drawn.

The first mystery of time, then, is how little of it anyone has. The second is how unimaginably vast time seems on either side of the mere moments humans manage to occupy. If the universe's history were compressed into an hour, the time that humankind has existed would barely fit into the last fractions of a split second of that hour. If humanity succeeds in extinguishing itself through ecological disaster or nuclear war, the spark of intelligent life that flared in this corner of the cosmos would be scarcely noticeable between the massive weights of time that stretched before and after it.

Is it possible to explain time? St Augustine put his finger on the nub of the difficulty when he said, 'If you tell me to meet you at such-and-such a time, I have no problem; but if you ask me what time is, I cannot answer.' As a bishop St Augustine should not, of course, have worried about time, which in theology is a minor matter, for the reason that the deity is eternal, and 'eternal' means 'outside time'; and since the deity and his eternal realm constitute ultimate reality, it follows that time is unreal. And one should not worry about what does not exist.
Unfortunately, the ill-defined nature of deity and eternity makes this a rather unpersuasive thought. Time is all too real, as its swift and ever-increasing pace testifies - to our dismay and eventual undoing.

Is there any point in trying to define time?
Perhaps not. It is one of those things that escapes direct attention, although it accompanies every deed and thought. It has a mysterious elasticity, passing at different speeds for different people, even for those engaged in the very same activity. For example: suppose we are at the cinema together; you are enjoying the film but I am not. Time will pass more swiftly for you than for me. Similar hours will be as nothing to a sleeper, yet will limp on leaden feet for one who watches over him.

This protean capacity of time is a significant matter for anyone who would live well. Consider: a weekend away from home in some beautiful, exciting or fascinating new place will feel like a lifetime while one is there, yet like a split second once one is home again. Both temporal judgements will capture something of the truth, which is that time is not something absolute and objective, ticking away in regular quanta, but is made of experience. Think of loitering at home for a week, doing nothing, and compare it with jumping on an aeroplane and visiting several exotic locations in the same space of days. More life gets packed into the latter than the former - more perceptions, more thoughts, more memories, a greater range of feelings; and it is these, not repetition and stasis, that measure life.

Some people use their energy to live many lifetimes in one lifetime. Others, through timidity or lack of imagination, use up a whole lifetime living less than one lifetime. These latter in effect eat their soup with a fork; they walk about with eyes shut, fingers in their ears, cotton wool in their noses. Not for them the vivid, pungent sensations of living along their pulses, experiencing everything at it's best.

That, for Walter Pater, is what a successful life is: 'A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life,' he wrote; 'how many we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'

The injunction to live life to the full might better, as this insight suggests, be phrased: Live all the lifetimes you can.