Feeding My Ignorance

This is a 'first' in my blogs - I am starting to write this without knowing where it is going to end up!  The trigger was the thought that I enjoy learning - I will 'devour' new information - I often follow trails through the world wide web and find myself at places that I didn't envisage when I started on the journey.

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Then - now and again - I think (simply) "Why?" - what was the point?

What good is it doing me to learn all these things?

How will I know when to stop?

Then I come back to the "only if" thought.  I cannot know what the future holds, so - to a large degree - I haven't got a clue what I will need to know in that future.  So - is there something that is 'preparing' me for that?  I look back at various things that I have learned through my life that have come back and been 'useful' later - sometimes it hasn't taken long - sometimes it has taken decades.

Was that my only chance to learn those things - or would there have been another one?  I don't know.  It could be argued that if I hadn't learned them then sufficient things would have changed to throw my life course in a completely different direction and then I wouldn't have needed to know those things.

I guess there is a big difference between 'planned' learning - where there is a 'reason' for whatever is being taught to you - for many that mostly takes place in school, college or university - but it also takes place elsewhere - in different places for different people - for some in the home - learning to be a responsible person - for some in church - learning to be a 'good' person - and, of course, there is the bad side as well.

I was going to say that in all of these 'planned' learnings there is a very clear 'teacher' figure who is in some sort of authority to you - that could be multiple people.

However, isn't it true that in all learning there is a teacher figure?  The places where we learn are many and varied - and sometimes the teacher is ourself - you could say that in this dialogue I am teaching myself.

This is - I think - just the beginning of a series on this subject - because I think it is important for me to work through this very wide topic.

The 'need' or 'desire' to learn - to understand - rather than just to know - seems particularly deeply ingrained in me.  However, it is only about some subjects.  There are some things that I can quite happily accept as "it happens" - there ar others when the "why" question comes over and over again - and it seems particularly important with regard to behaviour and how we think (at least that is true at the moment).

I have - at various stages of my life - been a 'collector' of information - won't list them all - it would only bring scorn down on me.  It does point to an inbuilt desire to analyse the available information rather than just 'accept' things as they are.  That can be both a blessing and a curse.

One such thing, that I am willing to admit to, is that I went through a phase of collecting data about how often different ensembles/orchestras were featured on the radio (Radio 3 in the UK was my chosen station in those days) - detailing the length of the pieces of music that they played as well as the frequency.  What good was that?  Well, to this day I am not sure I can tell you - except as practice for ways of collecting data which is something that I have to do for all sorts of reasons in my work.

However, I still have a bit of a fascination for collecting such 'statistics' - I'm not usually content with knowing that I have written a blog entry - I sort of need to know how long it is - is it the longest so far - and so on....

Yes - I am a bit sad

So - one reason for doing things is practice for a later time when it becomes important - knowing the way to analyse such data is useful because it makes the analysis so much quicker and efficient.

Other times I have learned about something and then explicitly looked for an opportunity to exploit that learning.

What most intrigues me though is that learning which seems to have no real purpose for later in my life - why do I read abook about XYZ when I have no expectation of every using that knowledge?  Do other people do that sort of thing, or are they content to learn what they need to know when they need to know it and completely ignore anything that is outside their immediate sphere of interest.

I think these blogs could run and run......