si dawson

With every­thing that's been hap­pen­ing lately, I've been won­der­ing why it is that years of edu­ca­tion only teach us how to read, write, and so on.

Who teaches us how to live? How to deal with painful emo­tions? How to sur­vive, or bet­ter yet, to thrive?

pic byJim Moore

Tra­di­tion­ally, this is the role our par­ents have — but the big assump­tion is that they already know, and they're not still pick­ing it up themselves.

Per­son­ally, it feels like so much of what I've learned in terms of deal­ing with the world and truly liv­ing I've only dis­cov­ered in the last few months & years.

To my com­plete lack of sur­prise, my Aikido sen­sei pointed out that this train of thought has already been well cov­ered (by some­one far more elo­quent than I):

THE VASTEST THINGS ARE THOSE WE MAY NOT LEARN

The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How piti­ful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the mas­ters of.

- by Mervyn Peake