Irrelevant thoughts

Tag: learning

  • I lost the glove

    I lost the glove

    When I was young I wanted to know everything that could be known. I found the television fascinating, which brought programmes into our house…, the radio, which did the same thing only along a line of sound…, I wanted to know how aeroplanes are made, I wanted to know everything there was to know…

    And somewhere around the 8th grade, learning in chemistry about Mendeleev’s table, I realized that the difference between the elements is only the number of electrons…, that between Gold and Iron there stands only that. I was left almost in shock…, I had heard stories about the “Philosopher’s Stone”, mysticism had made room for itself where there was no science…, and when you understand that “a teaspoon of electrons” can change something into something else, it is as if the Sun has risen and you see in colours; at night, in mysticism, you see everything grey and only contours…

    Much later I found out that in fact the protons are the cause…, their number makes the element, the electrons only follow them. Me, at thirteen, it struck in the form with the electrons, and that is how it stayed with me. But the fact that I found out only years later is the very proof of the thing I keep saying: the road does not end…

    I had been doing chemistry since around the 5th grade. That I understood only in the 8th has to do also with the teachers who taught only the school curriculum, without any inclination to explain things to the children in terms they could grasp, and somehow to make them understand…

    Nowadays everyone has access to information…, and precisely because of that, finding out is no longer a joy. The conversations between people are about sensational subjects…, nothing concrete, ideas are no longer discussed. And slowly…, slowly, myth makes its way back into social life — not because things are not known, but because knowing no longer brings anyone any joy…

    We are flooded with information and lost in it, bewildered…, and the common purpose, at the level of a people or of a civilization, I still do not see — other than money enough to secure yourself a high degree of comfort, without wishing to learn, to understand…, only to exist, and to call that “life”…

    And here is the link I saw late: curiosity about the world and curiosity about a person are the same appetite. When one goes out, the other does not remain…

    I have always considered that in a relationship of partnership things are easier, and I believe people are searching all the time…, only partnership is not handed out at the push of a button, and we have been raised to press. That is how it comes about that people search…, and keep on searching…

    It is said of two people that they fit like a glove…, and the expression knows more than it lets show: it speaks of a pair that recognizes itself, not of one that arranges itself. Today we have every form of communication, which mediates the distance between us…, we have almost everything at a button…, only we are so superficial that we can no longer bring our souls close…, we can no longer find the glove…

    A glove has its meaning only when it is worn…, otherwise it spoils, forgotten on a shelf in the wardrobe…

    We are in a phase in which only unpaired gloves are to be found…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: Pleasure

  • How it would be if I were

    How it would be if I were

    I cannot manage to understand why you would want to seem smarter than you are preparing to be.

    If you make an effort, if you read, if you learn…, you simply become, you learn foreign languages, there are a heap of forms through which you can turn yourself from the stance of an ignorant person into the stance of a smart person…, none of us was born smart, we all took the genetic fund and used what we had…, only there is no fast train…, you have to walk the road, to let your brain build new neural connections, that takes time, to get used to the newly assimilated notions, to integrate them into the processes of thinking…, etc…

    The intention to “take photos” with muscles, the way there used to be all sorts of cardboard figures “with muscles”, and there was a hole instead of a face, for each person to put his own face in and have a photo taken…, that is roughly how it looks, in my optics, to try to seem smart…

    And this is very hard, when everyone who finds himself at that point has the clear and entirely undoubting impression that he is smart…

    I met someone who told me, full of importance, that he wants to “invest” in a “kite” — he said it in English; in my language the thing is a zmeu, a paper dragon on a string. I was left perplexed, I asked what kind of investment that is…, I understood that he was masking a personal whim, in the way he put it, inside an “investment”…, as an expression…, that throws him outside the understanding of words, and if there were an area where people know what weight words carry…, he would have been outside, at a great distance from the gate…

    I feel myself the prisoner of these times in which, no matter what I say, it is twisted and interpreted “somehow”, and that is because we have got used to no longer naming things, but to using big words, each for his own reasons, but in general to “taking photos” (with muscles)…

    This society brings us into the comfort zone, where you have everything at the push of a button, you have remote controls, you have half-prepared food…, you no longer hear conversations of the kind “how are you managing with some problem in mathematics”, or “have you read such and such a book”…, all that is spoken is “have you been there?”, or “have you seen that?”, or “have you heard about such a thing (person)?”…, advice is no longer asked for in order to become…, a competition is held in order to seem “superior”, on criteria that are quite childish… (I have been, I have seen, I have heard)

    At some point a phrase was going around on sites (Facebook, for example), “life begins beyond the limit of the comfort zone”…, only there is no one left to understand it, because all around everything is comfort…

    If you do not expose yourself to situations that put you in the stance of going past your limits (the ones from that moment), you will never be more than that…, because you do nothing in that direction…

    And this is actually measured. In the Nordic countries, where evaluations were made on entire generations, intelligence scores kept climbing until those born around the middle of the ’70s, and from then on they came back down to where they had started. The interesting part is that the researchers compared brothers from the same family, in order to take genetics out of the equation…, and they came to the conclusion that both the climb and the fall come from the environment. They were not born weaker. The environment made them so.

    Which is exactly what I was saying at the beginning: no one is born smart, each one takes the genetic fund and does with it what he does…, only now we no longer do anything. We can say that this is how the end begins…, wrapped in warm socks and house slippers with a bit of fur on them…

    From this perspective, you do not even have to do very much in order to step out of the row…, and that is precisely what should give you pause: if the bar is that low, going over it is not a performance…, it is only the beginning of the road, the one without a fast train…

    I have met people past the age of 30 who thought of enrolling in high school, of taking their baccalaureate and of going through university…, and they set out precisely because they had above them superiors of the “comfortable” model, who did not manage very well in real life…

    Some of them enrolled for the baccalaureate four years in a row, until they passed it.

    I admire the people who went back to close a chapter of their life, to the measure of their potential…

    I am not trying to convince you. But if you have a measure of your own, I would like to hear it…

    Further: I realized that I am Grateful