My Dad is a know it all. He is absolutely unrelenting.
"You never stop learning, Dayna," He says.
At the dinner table he'd quiz my brother and sister, and I on State capitols and vocabulary words like "scintillating" and "runic." He'd even quiz my friends when they would come over after school.
"What is the only U.S. bill without a president on it?"
Blank stares.
It really did annoy me; always interrupting our movies and harassing my boyfriend, but now, as I am approaching the ripe old age of twenty five years, I am confronted with a very similar urge to prove my intelligence to everyone around me. I'm not sure if that is a normal urge, but I am exploring it. I am also trying my best to suppress it because, as was the case with my father, it really puts people off...just obnoxious, really.
"You never stop learning, Dayna." I thought that was silly, because as far as I knew, school was over after the 12th grade, or if one continued on to college, not long after. I did not realize, that upon graduation and receipt of my Bachelor's Degree, I would cling to my intellectual achievements as if they were the very pillars of my worth. After I graduated from college, I felt like I was being put out to pasture; retired into society as "complete" or "finished." That was it. I would choose a job, and hopefully that job would choose me and that was the end of it.
I did not like that feeling. I think I got a little depressed about it. And thus I began the stage of life I coined: my quarter life crisis. A fast forward montage of that would look like this: social seclusion, obsessive exercise, lots of wine. I quit five jobs in one year.
Now, a few years out and reasonably on the other side of that crisis, I have come to a few conclusions about the phenomenon of "learning," that I wish someone had told me a long time ago (not that I would have listened, if they had.)
What I Humbly Discovered:
1. There is ALWAYS going to be someone who knows more than you do, about EVERYTHING: It's a big, big world, and you are not the only dynamic, self aware person inhabiting it. I wish somebody would have grabbed me when I was 19 or 20, shook me and told me that very thing.
I think everyone wants to believe that their thoughts are profound and innovative, and sometimes they are. Mostly though, across the span of history, someone, somewhere has likely felt the way that you do. I don't mean to suggest that people don't have new ideas or new emotions. Rather, it's a humility thing; you might be really good at the flute or a whiz at algebra, you might know real pain or have true love but there will always be someone out there that is better and bigger and knows more about the world than you do. It's upsetting at first, but then, it's kind of exciting. It opens you up to a new kind of community and gives you the permission to continue to evolve and learn and grow up until the day you die.
For a few ages of my life, in my own self absorbed bit of youth, I definitely thought that my feelings were more sage and important than anyone's had ever been before. I think youth is fundamentally flawed that way. Maybe not flawed. Maybe just underdeveloped in that way.
The realization that I was not the expert on all things connected me with the rest of humanity; there were people in this world that had things to offer me. I think people who don't find their way to this conclusion have a really hard time in life, and are probably really lonely, and sometimes they lose their cool in a mall and try and set of a pipe bomb.
So obviously, I am a writer. Obviously, I must think I have something pretty interesting to say. Yeah, I guess that's still true. I guess that's why I am on the other side of that crisis and not still in the pits of it.
Okay, so my dad told me that you never stop learning. I think this must have been what he meant.
