I Trade in a Different Commodity [As is too often the case, I frittered away last night defending transsexual people like myself from unwarranted slurs. I don't have any idea why Friday nights have a high corrolation with such behavior, but I note it in passing. Anyway, instead of writing something totally coherent, I will write something that is rather spur of the moment, and hence may be somewhat disjointed and not completely thought through. Please be a good Subgenius and cut me some slack.]
On my morning walk to the grocery store, it occurred to me yet one more time and in one more way just why it is that I have such difficulty with the ways of our society. My goals in life are not universally held goals. I seek a different outcome and measure my success on a different yardstick.
I can think of no more rewarding occurrence in my life as a human being than having learned something, how to do something, how or why something works, or a new way of looking at some issue or event. My goal in life is to keep having this feeling until I die. All of my other life activities are merely support mechanisms in pursuit of that outcome. I measure my success by how often and too what depth I learn things.
As a teacher, I try to instill these same goals in my students. And this is why I sometimes fail. My students, indeed the majority of other people, seem to me to treat life as a if it were a competitive game whose goal is the accumulation of personal comfort. Learning seems to be incidental to that game. If the goal can be obtained by not learning, then who needs to learn? The goal seems to be, admittedly from my outsider's perspective, to win the game, using whatever personal standard has been set and by whatever means necessary, not just to participate in the common experience we have as we lead our independent lives.
Given a choice, I will always choose to learn. As a teacher, I will always wish to share what I have learned with others, not so that they can earn more, but so that we can share the joy of having learned more and anticipate a future in which we can jointly attempt to broaden our knowledge and at the same time, explore the deeper meaning of what we already know.
The most satisfying moments in my life have been the times when I have discovered that what I struggled to learn was part of a much larger tapestry and I could see how everything that I had been learning fit into that tapestry. The mental orgasms came when I discovered that the tapestry was itself part of an even larger structure. How can I ever share that with people whose interest seems to be to make an extra dime? |