Thoughts for the day

Education

Someone once said “education is wasted on the young.”  I think they were mostly right because, as youngsters, we are too focused on our immediate environment and learning to cope with it to be much interested in reading about it’s intricacies.

The learning process is somewhat like constructing a pyramid.  You start at the base and hope to reach the apex and place the final capstone.  In the beginning, there are so many things to learn about that it can seem overwhelming, and many would-be intellectuals are just swamped by it all and give up.

The difficulty in becoming educated is that the “base” is wide and there are many things to learn about and often it is like groping around in the dark, not knowing what is in front of you.   How often have you heard students say “I will never use that knowledge again,” or “why do I have to know that”?  I was one of those.  History, languages, social studies, the arts, mathematics, geography and sciences, are all parts of the pyramidal base.  As we progress through these subjects, they all tend to blend together.  History becomes a study of social behavior, mathematics is strongly linked to the arts and ultimately becomes a precise language, and the sciences engulf our entire physical world which can be described by that precise language.

On the ‘bell curve” of life, we are all of about the same intelligence.  What makes us different seems to be our level of interest.  I have never been able to figure out whether we are good at the things that interest us, or whether we are interested in the things we are good at.

Love & Marriage

Love is that invisible force that allows us to be attracted to our opposites.  Normally, we do not associate with people who are not like us.  Our friends tend to think like we do, enjoy the same things we do, and have our same values.  When “love” takes effect, all that goes out the window.

In nature, it is opposites that attract each other, but our judgements preclude that natural law and we gravitate toward those that are most like us.  Love removes “judgement” from the equation, and we find ourselves being attracted to our most opposites, people we have the least in common with.  This is a good thing because those people have the attributes that we are lacking and together we complement each other and should make a good team.  This is what marriage is all about.

Problems arise when we forget the love.  Suddenly we begin to notice the differences and start trying to correct them.  We begin to think that we want our mates to be just like us; battles ensue and divorce is usually the result.

Whenever these situations crop up, remember.  Remember why you fell in love in the first place.  Remember.  Try it, it’s really quite that simple!