I've quoted this before, from TH White's Once and Future King, when Merlyn is trying to help young Arthur (Wart) cope with sadness and frustration:
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something.
That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling
in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder
of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about
you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the
sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn.
Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which
the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never
fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing
for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science,
the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime,
natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have
exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and
theocriticism and geography and history and economics--why, you can
start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty
years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing.
After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to
learn to plough."
My New Year's resolution for this year (last year it was to do one
thing on my GTD 'important' list every day, instead of just urgent
tasks) is to learn to do something useful every day. It is not enough to just learn something new, I think, or even just to learn something new that is interesting. I think it must be something useful.
When you're stuck, it is easy to be overwhelmed by learned
helplessness, and nothing entrenches learned helplessness like
depending on other people to do everything for you, from taking away
your garbage to repairing (or more often these days, throwing out)
something that is broken.
The political elite wants you to feel helpless -- dependence keeps you in your place. The corporatist elite wants
you to feel helpless -- removal of your garbage and repair or
replacement of shoddy broken goods all 'count' in the computation of
GDP, which they would have us believe is the
index of prosperity. Composting and repairing your own stuff, and
(beyond the cost of materials) making your own stuff, does not count in
GDP. It is considered 'nonproductive' because no money changes hands. To oppressors, independence of their subjects is anathema.
It is also important, I think, to learn to do useful things before you have to. Just before Christmas, the connector on my piece-of-crap Dell computer's power cord came loose again.
I had promised myself I would take a course in small appliance repair,
but I never did it, and now it was too late. It took Dell three weeks
to courier another replacement cord to me, during which time my laptop computer became
a desktop computer, with the power cord carefully taped in the one
position that conducted current. How helpless, how humiliating. And,
given that it had happened before, and has happened to most of the Dell
owners I know, how foreseeable. But this learning was too late.
Last week (knowing the answer in advance) I called them again and said
I wanted the defective part repaired instead of just thrown out, and
asked where to send it for that to be done. The three people I spoke to
at Dell all cheerfully told me where to stick it. No one in the world fixes these things, they told me, just throw it in the landfill like everyone else. We depend helplessly on the Chinese sweatshop that makes them, just like you.
Likewise, I learned how to repair and replace the blade on my riding
mower (the manual was translated from some Asian language and was
undecipherable to those without an engineering degree). A neighbour and
a relative (both of whom learned by trial and error, and only when they had to) showed me
how to do it. There's no satisfaction from learning that late, that
urgently; there's only a reduction in the feelings of dread. But at least next
time I will know.
As Merlyn says, learning to do something isn't just for feelings of
learned helplessness. It's also good for feelings of being stuck, of
not getting anywhere, of not knowing what to do in some other, more
pervasive part of your life. Unhappy with your career and not sure what
to do about it? Learn how to plant saplings so that they have the
maximum chance of survival, and find out where to buy saplings for next
to nothing and when the next local tree planting event is, and then
show 'em what you know. Relationship with a significant other or dear
friend on the rocks? Take up yoga or vegetarianism or glassblowing and improve your
posture, your health, and your whole outlook on life. Will that solve
these intractable personal problems? No, but it will help you deal with
them better, will make you feel less helpless about dealing with problems in
your life generally, and more self-confident, more
positive, more capable.
Today I am learning how to make fruit smoothies.
Image: The glasswork of Dale Chihuly. Art imitating nature in nature
(here at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens, Coral Gables FL). He also has some neon/argon lights that look just like tumbleweeds. Thanks to Brad Mills for the link. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
