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Today's
quotation:
Education
is more than schooling. It is a cast of mind, a willingness to
see the world with an endless sense of curiosity and wonder. If you would be truly educated, you must adopt this cast
of mind. You must open yourself to the richness of your everyday
experience--to your own emotions, to the movements of the heavens and
the languages of birds, to the privations and successes of people in other lands and other times, to the artistry in the hands of the
mechanic and the typist and the child. There is no limit to the
learning that appears before us. It is enough to fill us each
day a thousand times over.
Kent
Nerburn
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Today's
Meditation:
"The
richness of your everyday experience." How easy
it is to forget this richness, or to miss it as we walk by
it constantly. The fact is that our worlds are
filled with such incredible beauty, with such wonderful
people, with such amazing opportunities that we never
would be able to take advantage of all of them in our
lifetimes simply due to a lack of time. Do we see
them, though, or do we miss them? Most of us miss
them regularly, for we get so caught up in the
"things" that we have to get done that we simply
don't look around ourselves and make an effort to
recognize the wonder and beauty of the world.
A
true education is simply learning about the world we're in
and how we fit into it. Most formal education deals
strictly with information and processes developed by human
beings. But true education more than anything else
results in awareness, and while many educational programs
seem to be about awareness, they're mostly trying to get
us to be aware of information, analysis of that
information, and application of processes based on that
information. This isn't to downplay the importance
of formal education--I'm thankful for doctors and
engineers and architects and mathematicians and all those
other wonderful people who work to make our lives better.
But
as Kent says, there's artistry in the hands of the
mechanic, though few of us see that. The cars that
we drive are amazing works of wonder that are almost
incredible in their scope--a person from 1000 years ago
would marvel at the machines, and marvel even more when he
or she found out that they were powered by fuel pumped
from the ground and processed to make gasoline. We
flip a switch and lights go on, powered by an electrical
plant sometimes hundreds of miles away.
This
world is an awesome, wonderful place. Too often,
though, we see it as a dreary, unpleasant place full of
obstacles and problems, a place where we simply muddle our
way through our lives. It's our choice, though--if
we choose to see and appreciate the wonder of the world,
we can learn more than we ever thought possible, and we
can make our lives truly bright, indeed.
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