Learning: Knowledge, the Future, and the Universe

Learning has always been something that I enjoyed doing. I remember as a child, I would look forward to getting a new workbook. I would sit and do it for hours on end. Learning has just always felt great to me. When I was in Grade 9, I got my first science textbook for class. The moment I got home, I sat down and started working through it. I worked for the rest of the day and had it entirely finished. The science classes for the rest of the year did seem quite slow after that, but there were always enough interesting facts thrown in by the teacher to keep me paying attention.

It's hard to describe how learning makes me feel; I find that very few people ever understand. I will be learning something new, when all of a sudden, I can feel the pieces fit together perfectly with other things I had learned, and I get the most amazing feeling. It is an addictive rush that I imagine is quite similar to the rush a sky diver or mountain climber gets. I will get tingly all over, overcome with such a great amount of emotion. Sometimes my eyes will even water from my amazement. It's one of the greatest feelings I have ever felt, and wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

An example was in a calculus class. I was sitting in a lecture, and all of a sudden I got to a point where I realized that almost all the math I'd learned throughout my life had just been applied in a problem to come out with a solution that, to me, fit perfectly together. It gave me this immense sense of awe over the universe. It made me feel so tiny and so large instantaneously. On the one hand, I felt that these amazing laws fit so naturally together that everything must be guided by them, including myself, and that I was just a pawn of these forces. But on the other, I felt as if I had just taken a peek at the gears of the universe, and that anything was possible.

I like to think of the people who derived the ideas I'm learning. Often, the underlying ideas come from hundreds of years ago, which is astonishing to me because they didn't just learn it, they were enlightened enough to see that it needed solving, and created a method to figure it out!

The more I learn, the more frequently I find that I become amazed. When you're little, very often, you find yourself wondering what the point of the work you're doing is. But, as you get older, if you stay the path, you find out that all these seemingly worthless things you've acquired turned out to be the most vital aspects of understanding life. Thus, life long learning is not only important for your future career, but also to maintain a certain amount of awe for the world in which you live in.