...HURTS. It hurts. It burns not stings, it digs deep and serrated drags slowly through your open sore. PAIN. Oh it hurts bad, it hurts with stress and dread. Your guts, the lower half lighten up with icky stick and goo, and a sour film douses your securities. This is learning after having learned a lot. Because as you learn more, you think you are becoming more stable and aware, that you begin to know what you're doing. This is the problem with getting a totally foreign new job that has lots of technicality - like learning a new language, ask Darin about that one. It's embarassing. Embarassing is HURT. It's that sucky pain in your stomach. Because you're "vulnerable", and to learn means to have to fail and then work to succeed again. That's learning.
Some people never let themselves completely learn; some people become very fixed in the comfortable pre-learned things they have attained. Socially, for instance, we have learned certain ways to be, ways that are appropriate or convenient, ways that benefit our own surival seemingly the most. But then take all those certain ways, and transpose them into a totally foreign world...how many of your certainties do you think would stand up against a gang of knuckled-fisted dudes chasing you down a dark 1-way alley to rob you and kick you blind. How many certainties? How many job securities are you willing to give up to try something new.
The people I respect the most in this world are those who do one of two things:
1 - People who transfer to a 4-year college from community college and then actually graduate, and
2 - People with the guts to quit their job.
Both exhibit the qualities that I think suggest they are ready to LEARN, not out of laziness but out of a recognition and action with regards to some dissatisfaction they are having in their lives. Sometthing has put a question mark into the air for them, and these people, in-tune enough to feel this something strange, no longer ignore or repress that dissatisfaction but satisfy it through a desire to make a change to what is already normal and acceptable to them. In other words, these people openly display a desire to truly LEARN. Learn. LEARN.
Well, I've learned over the past week. Now I am sitting on the floor of Joey's room thinking about the trees I saw this morning at dawn, or the Japanese ladies that loved to use my name in San Jose, or the swift and chilly drive across Highway 1 in that massive smelly lovetruck with no music or distractions to cling to but the wide open road, the slid open doors, the cold ocean, the afternoon's wind, trees, a girl next to me, old bread locked in a cafe in behind, my hot tired hands, my smiling face and all the adventures of a fall upcoming that holds only mystery.
So there it is. I'll still say, santa cruz as a place to live ain't all that great. Basically, the people suck. Especially the potgrower trashmakers that hate me and my car. But should that bother this boy? Maybe its a learning experience, just like it takes to learn how to do a new job or quit an old one, maybe I need to learn how to not care what other people think anymore. Or better, at least.
So there's my introspection for the day. Hopefully you're all having a beautiful sunday of fall!
Love Mikie
A Moment in the Sun - a literary journey
2 years ago
5 comments:
what potgrower trash makers? joey's roommates? what girl in the car next to you? candice? did she go to the farmer's market with you to sell bread? this posting leaves many unanswered questions and i need you to "tell all!"
Heather, I feel the same way. I was just asking matt these same questions. And then lo and behold- you ask them. Mikie, we love your posts. Always something new and interesting- but not enough about YOU and what you do( I know you are probably thinking that you do, and you do tell us a lot of whats in your head but not what you are doing physically). I think learning not to care about what all the other people think is great and very healthy. Every single one of us live in our own little world. We all see things very different. What someone says about your car or you, really has nothing to do with you or your car in your world. Its all about them in their world and how they perceive things. So we really can't take things personally or to heart even if its something nice. We really need to learn about ourselves. Yeah, it's great when someone pays us a compliment, but we can't rely on that. We need to be the source of our own happiness.
I like how Bill Murray sums it up in Lost in Translation.
Charlotte: I just don't know what I'm supposed to be.
Bob: You'll figure that out. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.
This is one of the true-est things ever in the world. And it leaves one feeling one thing, as you get older and older,.... it leaves you just grateful for every breath we still DO have.
You learn and you fall, you get up and learn more and fall again. You learn the most when you think you have finally learned everything.
“You have heard about It, but that is not enough. You must experience It. Mere intellectual recognition will not give you true knowledge of It. Neither can It be taught to you. The teacher can only show the way. You must find It for yourself.”
The arrogant and foolish man thinks he knows everything; but the true knower is humble. He says: “How can I know Thee, who art Infinite and beyond mind and speech?”
Oh Mikie, isn't learning, and even humiliation when it must come (and it does!) just setting us up to learn how to out-grow the little things into knowing that we only have so much control over the people and things around us, but we have total control over how we perceive experiences and people, no matter HOW they act toward us? And doesn't that, if we let it, teach us to later handle the same situations or similar ones with grace and without fear of the unknown. I love entering the unknown in life! And I love trying to NOT take things personally, no matter what is happening around me, or even directly towards me. It's pure magic when you can beat it. THis has been the hardest lesson of my life. Knowing that my direction of THINKING about or towards something ACTUALLY makes it more real. Or real in the first place. I have learned this lesson over and over again, and for that, I am a fool. But I am still working on it, and always shall be.
you, mikie, a brave soul, you are. I love you, young man! Miniature man in a 4 year old church suit man!
I had a lot to say about this when I first read it (and I did indeed read it), but now that I'm way behind and its months later and I never commented, I won't.
Except this: I love learning. Love love love it. I could go to school, read books, talk and chat forever. It's great and perfect to learn. I mean, we have the capacity, why not? But when I learn new things I wouldn't say it hurts (but that's just me); it's more like invigorating, exciting, eyeopening, appealing, appalling maybe.
Perhaps those are all aspects of hurt though.
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