It’s been a full day of learning, and my mind is oversaturated. So to wind down, I’m listening to Seuss and Addie’s 56th podcast of The Unharshed Mellow for the second time since they aired it last week and I’m going to process a couple of photos and then go to bed.

Today consisted of an all-day conference — I didn’t just go for the free food, I swear! — then flight school. Which is pretty much how I spent last Wednesday, too. What did I learn? Well, a fair bit, but what also came to mind was how a segment from the conference and a segment from ground school echoed previous learning, i.e., as far back as high school.

My high school, which was in the tiny community of Aldergrove about an hour east of Vancouver, had very little in the way of extra-curricular activity. I have to give credit to my classmates (all 17 of them) for being mostly scholarly types and raising the academic bar in my year. What that meant for me was even though I didn’t really hold any interest in becoming valedictorian, I was surrounded by ‘A’ students and had to work that much harder if I didn’t want to appear an imbecile. What that also meant is that I had to work harder to stay off the bottom of the class in subjects I didn’t excel in: physics, algebra, chemistry, biology — the sciences, essentially. (Out of my class of 18 students, nearly all went on to become engineers, lawyers, dentists, accountants, teachers. It was a brainy bunch.)

It surprises even me that I’d end up today working with numbers and data and computers, then voluntarily put myself to learning aeronautical theory FOR FUN. The arts has virtually disappeared from my occupational life and remains almost exclusively as a hobby (photography, writing, etc.). When I ask myself how this came to be, I think of a conversation I had last week with someone who attended a work-related course with me. I told her that I feel I learn the most in areas where I’m the weakest. It’s not that learning becomes dull in areas that are more familiar, but there are certainly fewer Eureka! moments. It’s those Eureka! I get it now! moments that I find highly satisfying and motivating. It’s like cracking a code, solving a problem, finding a solution, demystifying an abstract system. If you can find an employer who encourages education and training then surround yourself with knowledgeable people, that is the sort of environment where learning becomes incorporated into everyday life instead of being institutionalised and a cost you bear alone in terms of time and money.

It also came to mind sometime during the day that the benefits of learning are often delayed. For instance, during flight school we were covering some physics theories and I immediately thought of one of my high school physics teachers getting completely exasperated with our class and throwing down a chalk brush, silencing the din.

“I AM NOT A BABYSITTER!”

I’d love to tell him now that I was actually paying attention and I remembered what he was trying to teach us, except it took nearly 20 years for the concept to actually have a practical application in my life.

Another example is driving. I still remember to this day certain things my driving instructor taught me when I was 16, like how to judge angles while parallel parking. He also taught me to keep the wheels pointing forward while waiting in the intersection for a left-hand turn to avoid getting pushed directly into oncoming traffic in the event I get rear-ended. I even remember the instructor’s name, the driving school, and that the car was white. Bizarre.

It took me an entire summer of working at a group home for the mentally ill to raise enough cash to buy my way to freedom, that is, pay for driving lessons. In those days freedom meant a drivers license — I lived in a hamlet with almost zero public transit — so those lessons became very precious to me. I still remember having to take on very unpleasant tasks for my summer job, like bathing old, smelly men and cleaning up after incontinent women day after day. I often wondered if it wasn’t just easier to go work at the local McDonald’s, but I kept plugging away at the job until I finished paying for the whole series of lessons and passed my road test. I was determined to pass — after all, I knew if I failed, the only way I could pay for more lessons was to spend more time at the community home, where I witnessed people getting violent if they didn’t take their medication. That was more than enough motivation for me to learn how to drive!