Living-Learning and Teaching

This is a deeper dig into the list that I had created for my article titled: Do Something Every Day. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/11/living-do-something-everyday.html

Ever since I was young, my parents and my culture had instilled a sense of respect for learning. Even though the dominant pedagogical philosophy in Taiwan was of the cram and memorize in school, I learned more by asking Why? What if? And How? questions. In fact, when my family moved to Honduras, one of the new family friends there would shake his head at how often Why? came out of my mouth.

It was a natural habit that follows me today, although the persistent question asking has been tempered by circumspection and patience.

The joy of learning and the pride in knowing is a part of my genetics, it is my raison d’etre. I realized this fact about myself late in life, much after I had set my life on a path which was expected of me: to chase after the brass ring.  Our society does not hold the idea of knowledge for the sake of knowledge in high regard. My pursuit of broad knowledge is considered by society as living as a jack of all trades but master of none, which is considered a pejorative in our society because  of society’s need for its workers to specialize and concentrate on narrow bailiwicks and serve as replaceable cogs in the production machine supersedes society’s desire to have people who knew knowledge for the sake of knowledge.   

I have instead started telling people that I am a polymath in training because I felt I needed to disguise my joy in pursuing my catholic span of interests. Saying that you are training to become a polymath is slightly more respectable than being a jack of all trades; at the least the term polymath will send people off to Google before they can denigrate the idea. As I became fascinated with the idea of the polymath, I have come to appreciate the implications of being a polymath. There is even a book espousing the many merits of a polymath (Ahmed 2019), or in David Epstein’s book on generalist.  (Epstein 2019)

It may have started out as a snarky retort, but this has become my purpose in life and my destiny: to know something about everything and everything about something.

In the ever-pragmatic reality in which we exist, the societal norm is to treat knowledge as salable commodities. This attitude narrowly define knowledge as either being  immediately applicable or as the basis for creating new knowledge from the foundation of the old knowledge. All to advance human progress. This was especially true in my chosen profession of engineering. We were judged as either as applied, real-world engineers; or as theoretical and impractical researchers.

Teaching is an obvious third option, but it is held as a very non-glamourous, non-celebrated third option. Society views teaching as necessary but non-value-added proposition for passing on the knowledge to the future workforce. Even though many researchers inhabit the hallowed hall of academia, their worth is determined narrowly by their originality and ability to break new grounds in their niche subjects.  The teaching part of their profession has rarely been celebrated as a standalone achievement, only as a companion, a complementary function that is secondary to the innovation and creative endeavors of the researcher. There have been good, if not great teachers amongst the great innovators, but the brilliance of their pedagogical prowess are seen merely as a bonus rather than as a primary endeavor.

As I worked my way through the usual career of an engineer with a doctorate, I found myself drawn to the teaching function as I got older. My gift, I realized, was not in applying the knowledge, or creating new knowledge; instead, my gift was in my ability to communicate knowledge to others. As I look back at my career as an engineer, I was never happier than when I was doing research, to learn, and then to teach.  I did get a thrill while applying my knowledge, at witnessing a design evolve into a product, or investigating the unexplored territories of engineering, creating something new and heretofore unknown; it is just that the thrill of connecting with another human while sparking their minds gave me bigger and more thrilling thrills.

I decided to make the learning something new every day and teaching someone something every day the central tenets in my daily list of habits. Habits that I hope to internalize. Habits that will  be my wu-wei behavior: doing without knowing, action without thought, impulse rather than intent. Make learning and teaching a deeply integrated part of my being. So it is that I train myself to do it everyday.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Waqas. The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility. New York City: John Wiley, 2019.

Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

 

 

Living-Do Something Everyday

 

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.” Jim Valvano (Valvano 2013)

Jim Valvano, in his now famous speech at the 1993 ESPY’s encouraged everyone to do three things every day: laugh, think, be moved to tears. The idea is that if you did these three things every day, you have lived a full day. This was a speech given when Coach Valvano knew he had very little time left on this earth.

While I agree with Coach Valvano, I also think that we can do more in the time that we do have  on earth, because we would be remiss if we did not strive to be more ambitious, more greedy with what we desire in our time on earth.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca takes a different viewpoint.  On the Shortness of Life,  Seneca reproaches his friend Paulinus for grieving over the shortness of life,

The majority of mortals, Paulinus, complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, because even this space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live. Nor is it merely the common herd and the unthinking crowd that bemoan what is, as men deem it, an universal ill; the same feeling has called forth complaint also from men who were famous...It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly. ,  (Seneca 1997)

The difference between the two thought pivots on one point: Coach Valvano’s advice was his last word for those us who are left after his passing, a bit of wisdom from someone who has learned the value of life and who is resolved to his fate. It is a last exhortation to live life as he would have liked to  continue to live.

Seneca’s view is in reaction to those who have been slothful and wasteful with the lives that have been given. He is disappointed, if not outright disgusted, with the way we humans are wasting the life that we are given.

Most of us, and I am among the worst offenders, live our lives as though we had infinite time to do infinite things. This blind belief in our immortality starts when we are young, based on youthful hubris when we were on the precipice of adulthood, fueled by confirmation and optimism biases. We carry that belief in our immortality into our middle and, to a large extent, into our old age. It isn’t until the finality of our very definite mortality has made abundantly clear  that we begin to regret our wasted lives. There is a refrain that is often recited derisively by the old in admonishing the young: you are wasting your life; you need to do more with your life. The dominant interpretation of “not wasting your time on earth”  is usually skewed to the  puritan work ethic that has been ingrained in every cell of our being since time immemorial. We are led to believe that living a productive, high achieving, and hard-working life; while contributing to the economy and society is the only definition for having lived a worthy life. This is definitely not my view. I am not of the opinion that we should all just stop working, that being productive, high achieving, and hard-working are undesirable; I believe that while they are important, they are not the sole defining qualifications for having lived a worthy life.

There are many facets to our lives, it is up to us to

Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are.

Nkosi Johnson

It is our actions in meeting the idea which is encapsulated in the previous quote that assures us of lengthening the time that we have to live:

•  doing what we can
•  with what we have
•  in the time that we have
•  in the place that we are.

I have been thinking about this topic for a while as I was going through a mid-life crisis and looking backwards at my past and the roads not taken, then I started to deliberately explore myself, I started to look at the me that occupies my mind when I am not occupied with paying my bills. I will grant that this is a luxury that most of us can ill afford, but it is what kept me sane in my time treading water in the corporate miasma.  In diving deeply into this thought, I started feeling  pangs of regret: for making the conscious decision to concentrate on the rational and certain parts of myself while also making the conscious decision to  neglect the sentient and amorphous parts of myself because that is what I was expected to do, as a productive member of the society, contributing to the burgeoning economy.

As with most humans, uncertainties bothered me, so I chose to ignore uncertainty and embraced the deterministic and predictable. I ignored the uncertain, the random, the unmeasurable and the unknowable; and in so doing I failed to leave room for grace, for beauty, for serendipity, for the unknown, and for the irrational real.

As I have come to the middle of my life, I appreciate the uncertain, the random, the unmeasurable and the unknowable. I did not realize that grace, beauty, serendipity, the unknown, and the irrational real  is such an essential part of my life. Indeed, I was mentally, intellectually, and emotionally skewed for a long time without realizing it. This was the key revelation which helped make me whole; I am now ready to make up for lost time.

I started the list as a way to feed my need for order in my life. I have planned, kept journals, and tried uncountably many different methods of organizing myself. I have always failed because I have never made it a habit to be organized. As a lifelong perfectionist, I have always put off executing my organizing because the conditions were never perfect, I always felt that I needed to wait to pull the trigger because I can always make the conditions better so that my execution of my organizational plan will be perfect; it was the act of a mad man, I was foolish, delusional, and definitely self-deceptive. My response to this failure to execute is to self-flagellate, bringing all the years of Asian guilt that had accrued in my psyche to bear on myself; until one day I came to the realization that Life is not a Game of Perfect, that instead of punishing myself, I needed to take care of myself, my whole and undivided self. This is when this list germinated.

I have tried to implement this list for the past year, I have found it difficult to execute consistently, yet I have found pleasure in meeting its challenges mainly because the ideas are so abstract and it takes a bit of imagination to actually accomplish. I have not quit even though I have yet to accomplish the list completely in one day, but I have had a very nice journey, I have enjoyed the process; which indirectly became a valuable part of the lesson: it is in the perseverance that the process becomes well hewn. I have not had a desire to not complete the list every day because I believe in this list. People like measurable results because they are tangible and obvious, while the immeasurability of the process is intangible and abstract. The magic happens in the confluence between the measurable and the immeasurable , the tangible and the intangible, the obvious and the abstract. It is not about seeing my choices as a dichotomy, that is a human construct; it isn’t about the either/or; it is about the alchemy which blends both; it is about the greater whole, the yin and yang as two halves of the whole circle.

Here is the list. I will explain each bullet later. I have had some excellent days engaging in the serendipitous process of doing while also reveling in the amorphous and ambiguous.

Note that this is not a definitive list, it is my list, it serves me. As with all things that I have done or are doing, I reserve the right to change my mind, this is a capture of this moment in time which is reflective of me.

I try to do all these things in a day; but more importantly, I also try to do it as a natural part of the ebb and flow of the daily rhythm. I do this without calling for notice or recognition, i.e. do it without an ego. Finally, I do this while in wu-wei, that is: I try not to try.

Things to do Every Day*

• Learn something new
• Teach something
• Experience something beautiful
• Be inspired by something wise and profound
• Allow something to move you to tears
• Do something unfamiliar
• Do something uncomfortable
• Do something that makes you feel vulnerable
• Do something kind and generous
• Love someone unconditionally

*In reviewing my list against Coach Valvano’s list, I can safely say that I embraced the spirit of his three things, except I am much more pedantic and nitpicky, but that is my nature.

Works Cited

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. "On the Shortness of Life." In On the Shortness of Life, Life is Long if you Know How to Use it, by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 1-33. New York: Penguin Books-Great Ideas Series, 1997.

Valvano, Jim. "Jim Valvano's ESPYs Speech Transcript: Full Text." MyTownTutors. March 28, 2013. https://www.mytowntutors.com/jim-valvanos-espys-speech-transcript-full-text/ (accessed November 25, 2020).