Why Is Learning Important?

I still remember the first day of English class in my sophomore year of high school very clearly. Which might not seem like that great a feat…except this was over 15 years ago. This was partly because it was the first class of the day I shared with a new acquaintance of mine (someone I still consider to be a best friend to this day). And partly because of a piece of writing the teacher asked us to do.

Yes, an essay on the first day of class! With a prompt I actually enjoyed writing on enough to remember almost two decades later.

But the topic was actually a fun one, and only set the stage for the type of prompts we’d see in that class. Thought-provoking short essays, meant to help students practice their writing on something that actually mattered to them: themselves. What would you change about your life if you could go back in time? and Which actor should play you in a movie? took the place of the normal bell-ringers in the other classes that year. But that first day, the prompt was What are you scared of most? There are the typical ways to answer, of course. Public speaking, which almost across the board even trumps death in every study, heights, crowds, etc. For sophomore me, for today me too, there are quite a few things I am afraid of. However, what gets the crown of most is this: having nothing left to learn.

The idea I could just one day wake up and know everything. It terrifies me.

What would you strive for if there was no moving forward? No way to improve yourself? I’m not defining learning as formal education here, but all the things that can fall under that umbrella. Experiencing something for the first time. Reading new stories. Watching new shows or movies. Interacting with other people. Unless you’ve invented a time machine and are going back to a day you’ve already had and doing things exactly the same way as the first time, there is a multitude of learning opportunities every day. Simply because they are new days.

Even consuming content you’ve already seen or heard or read has something of value because there will always be something new. Not because the content changed, but because you did. So consider it my goal to never stop learning. To never stop advocating that learning is so incredibly important to life itself. Welcome to a few of the things I’m learning about myself!