Let’s set a scene for a moment. Child comes in from school. Parent, grandparent or other adult is waiting, ready to start a conversation, hoping to discover how the school day went. Despite all of the hopes of the adult, the conversation frequently ends up being little more than a brief exchange, going something like this:
“What did you learn today?”
“Nothing.”
You just might be chuckling right now as you connect those words to familiar voices. You’ve probably overheard that exchange once or twice, if not had it yourself. It’s possible you’ve even been on both sides of the conversation. The adult sometimes pushes, hoping the child will dig a little deeper and realize that learning really has occurred. Other times, the adult simply chuckles, recognizing the truth that, even if the exchange remains exactly the same day after day after day, it will be obvious by the end of the year that the child did, in fact, learn a great deal through the course of the year.
Every single day, students receive information, engage with it, process it, and reinforce the learning of it through discussions, projects, and tests. Learning happens slowly but steadily, reinforced through the very system that they often assume is failing them because they don’t tangibly see what they learned that day, week, month, or year. Learning is work. It takes time. But our educational systems are designed to guide students through that lengthy process in such a way that they don’t even realizing the work is truly…well…working.
Now, I admit that not all of our educational systems are successful. That’s another discussion for another time and place. But the point is that learning happens for students whether they are consciously aware of it or not, simply because they are engaged in a system that helps them engage with the information presented to them. It is a system designed to equip the learning process.
Then we graduate and the system changes. We have avenues for learning how to meet the demands of our jobs. And we have demands that insist we learn even when there are not systems in place to help us with the learning. Tax season insists that we learn how to file properly. Life management requires that we learn how to keep up with cleaning and maintenance of our homes and vehicles.
But, there is so much more to learn than just how to do our jobs or pay our taxes or maintain homes and vehicles. A wide range of personal growth awaits us throughout our adult years. It’s just so easy to miss that growth because we lack the automatic systems that present the information we need before guiding us through a pattern of reinforcement.
So, we have to create those systems ourselves. We have to build habits of taking in, processing, and engaging with new information. And we have to make ourselves push through, even as they days, weeks, and months pass with us feeling like that child who has learned “nothing” in school. Just like that child, we don’t see the increments of growth. We’ll only discover it when we look back after a year or two, or maybe even ten, and see how we are different now. How our understanding has grown. How our patterns have changed. How our hobbies or habits or skills are more developed.
Friends, that’s hard work.
But it’s worthwhile work. It’s worth it to have a huge “to be read” stack of personal growth books. It’s beneficial to make yourself journal something every single day even if it’s hard to pinpoint what stood out. It’s progress when you keep practicing, keeping pounding, keep persevering even when you don’t benefit or progress from your effort.
It’s worth it because you’re learning something, even when it feels like nothing. Yes, it’s hard work. Yes, it seems as pointless as sitting in a classroom often did when you were a student. But, at the end of the year, you’ll be able to look back and see that somewhere along the way you really did learn. You grew. You improved. You advanced. You progressed.
That’s the hard work of learning. And it’s worthwhile. So, what have you learned today?
Not Quite Ordinary 