Learning for Life

Today's blog topic really threw me!  " What learning experience has had the greatest impact on you?"

One experience that has most impacted me....yikes...impossible!  There are dozens of meaningful experiences from which I have learned  so much it would be impossible to cite just one! Like...leaving the East Coast to live in Texas for 2 years right out of grad school....becoming a mother and perhaps really understanding my own mother for the first time....the HERS Summer Institute at Bryn Mawr in the summer of 1993...that moment in 4th grade when I realized there is no absolute truth - teachers sometimes make it up....an interaction with a student in need when it becomes clear you don't need to understand someone's language to understand their fears...finding out that I can be the calmest person in an emergency even when it is my own...

Almost daily it seems there's an opportunity to learn something new, and the more I thought about it, the more apparent it became that the greatest learning experience of all is just being open to the experience. If we're lucky, we never stop learning, never stop seeing the impacts of experiences that change our life - sometimes subtlely and sometimes dramatically - but always there. 

 I'll confess that when I was younger I expected to finally "get it" and feel that I had reached my potential, but somehow the older I get, the more I realize that there is no end, no way to "get it" all.  In fact, as I get older, the more I realize the things to learn from are expanding and the time to learn them in is shrinking!

Somewhere along the line when I figured this out, I  made a commitment to myself to strive to be open to learning something new every single day - no matter how small.  Not just for the self-improvement (although that is important), but sometimes just for the sheer joy of discovery & wonder about what new thing will reveal itself tomorrow! 

As Eartha Kitt once said " I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma!" How about you? Can you identify what you learned today?