Childhood’s a time when we learn extensively, picking up enormous amounts of information, learning from our parents, teachers, our environment.
We carry no limitations of who we can learn from, and who we cannot. Nor of consciously hoarding information and not letting on. We have an intense desire to learn. Of course our tendency towards indiscriminate learning makes some restraint and guidance necessary.
And then we grow up.
We lose a lot of things on our way from childhood to adulthood. We lose the 3 most important things that can help us learn at our peak.
- Humility
- Openness
- Desire to learn
1. Humility allows us to admit to ourselves that there is something to learn from others. The day we believe that we know more than our neighbour, our learning slows down. Humility means respecting the other – peers, superiors, juniors, strangers – irrespective of their station in life, and there’s plenty to learn from all.
Secondly, when we are more ready to speak than to listen, we aren’t trying to learn. We are posing. We are taking pride in the little that we know. And we pay less attention to the vast amount that we don’t know.
Why do we lose the humility to learn?
Maybe to a lot of us, to admit that we have something to learn is to admit to a weakness – our mistakes, our shortcomings, the gaps in our knowledge or performance. A weakness in our world is not looked upon with favour. It’s a brave few who do it; they are the ones who benefit enormously by admitting that they have more to learn.
2. Openness is the readiness to share our thoughts, our ideas without hoarding them. Of accepting others’ ideas without prejudice and in turn giving our own to help others. Neither money nor knowledge ever grew with hoarding. It grows with opening it to others – with allowing others to add to it.
Openness means that we do not become acquisitive with our space, time and ideas. It also means that we are open to feedback. The sad part is that we define ourselves through our work. And a feedback for correction shows the gaps in our work. We can embrace it with openness. Or we can fight it, believing that it belittles us.
What works against openness?
When we look for praise, and when we look for personal acquisitive gain, we work against openness. When we look for praise we are looking outward for our sense of worth, we aren’t looking for intrinsic self-worth. When that happens, the community and the public become the judge of what we do and what we don’t. And hence, how we learn. And how we share.
There isn’t much wrong with personal gain. In fact, it’s the cornerstone of private initiative. But when the gain – fame, money, power or any number of such derived attributes – becomes the primary focus, the importance we give to the essential things in life gets sidelined.
In both cases, we hoard learning wanting it to benefit us and us alone. In doing so, we minimize our learning and lose the chance to maximize it.
3. The Desire to Learn is the most basic requirement, so much so that without it there is no learning. Somewhere along our growing years, we lose our desire for active learning and we lose our inquisitive minds. The millions of questions of our childhood drop to a handful.
Why do we lose the desire to learn?
Because learning requires active work. Choosing not to learn is in some, a reflection of laziness. In others, it is an indication of comfort with the status quo.
Learning forces us to constantly sift through our beliefs and knowledge and make continual adjustments based on new facts and observations; to admit that what we believed yesterday could be wrong or at best, may no longer hold good today. With time, we seem to lose our flexibility and our readiness to change. What’s easier than to live as we are, where we are, with whatever knowledge and belief systems we have – it looks solid. While change looks like the shifting sands.
But why should we learn?
Because learning was what helped us adapt to our surroundings and our advancement across millions of years. Of moving from the sea to land, to moving from early humans to the current civilizations and more.
We wouldn’t be where we are without learning. We would be where we are without learning.
Now, that’s a depressing scenario.
Poetry in Life 
As we grow our realization and consciousness of our self and the persona and identity harden like plaque on the teeth. As the consciousness of the self hardens, the intellectual territorial boundaries solidify as they are the only proof of our existence… we close our open doors and windows.. be less open.. to imbibe…
However i do not mean that people who are open to learning even in adulthood do not have a strong consciousness of the self. They at times are just open…. Plaque-less…
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And then death comes. For us to begin afresh.
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Hello Madhuri,
Clubbing Humility & Openness:
There is this scenario.
Generally Elders have tried and tested ways of doing things. They would not be intent on going through a transition where they have to unlearn and adapt newer ways.
The point here is, what they learnt then, is not necessarily wrong, but with swiftly changing times, it is not in sync with current flow.
So in this way, humility and openness helps in bridging this gap between ideas.
Lastly, “Desire to learn”: Desire to learn, as you said, only exists in a functional mind and for a human to survive, optimum utilization of his mind is inevitable.
Very good post, completely justifying the title and touching most of it facets.
Regards,
Abhay
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learning in adulthood is rewinding childhood.
believe me m njoying re-learning drawing but is v v difficult as we already have set pattern in our mind that grass is green and sky is blue. It is difficult to break open those chain and color grass yellow and sky pink.
we have to be prepared to wipe off and unlearn things to learn new things which we are not prepared whn we grow up because we fear people will think it is our shortcoming and weakness.
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