Learn With All Our Tools

I want to address the ideas of fear and obsession of the mind.  I've come into ideas about what fear of doing or not doing something can do to one’s life.  I've experienced what that looks like in my life, and the results are rarely worth bragging about.  Marching through the fear of being uncomfortable and of learning something new is a great experience if looked at as a challenge that demands attention.  Learning scary but cool stuff like computers, or physics, or even how to behave on a first date is all there for the taking online.  I was afraid of computers 7 years ago.  Today, I have a modestly successful IT career, by my impossible standards anyways, that lays waste to how feeble an excuse for inaction fear and uncertainty are allowed to provide.  If one is willing to throw intense learning efforts at something with reckless abandon and obsess about it, then you are in business in the IT world.  If you have an obsessive mind, you are a very fortunate person by my account.  But, it is only a double edged sword of both asset and liability if you allow it to be.  How it sculpts or cuts your life depends upon if you choose to have willingness or fear wield it.

My late Father wouldn't and couldn't stop learning about all things he could, both about things he agreed with and wisely about things he didn't.  I was wrong in how I viewed his obsession to do so and his encouraging me to do the same; that it wasn't just an annoying geeky liability.  Again, I was wrong.  Learning, for my him, and now for me, was experienced the same way with Asimov and Feynman and many others, and I recall feeling my chest collapse when I related to that kind of mind while watching interviews of great scientists.  Hedonism.  Hedonism!  It was a word I was taught to fear while I was in orthodox faith healing alcoholics anonymous.  Having it happen this way is a luxury I hope others also relate to.

What I have encountered in my efforts towards certain areas of debate since November of 2011, though, has brought fear back to my life, but it is mixed with sadness for others and even more gratitude for my situation.  I've come to find out that it isn't just everyone that is given the opportunity to cross the line into hedonistic learning or understand what that looks like, and I really struggle to accept that.