Learning

Learning is the supreme joy in life.  Of course, our whole life is a continuous process of learning from the time we learn to walk, to talk, to sing, then to count, to write, and to play, in our childhood, as well as to detect dangers, control anger, behave politely, and exercise compassion, through our schooling, and then living and working as a member of the society.  Year by year, we learn and continue to learn.  As an adult, we had to learn to find ways of earning a living, to associate, negotiate, and resist temptations. I am thinking, however, of learning what is hard to learn, of learning anything with a challenge.  In my old age, after retirement, the special pleasure has been to concentrate on learning anything without regard to necessity, merely to enjoy the effort spent in learning and the reward of having mastered something even if less well than aspired.

What we have learned we may forget.  But after years or even decades, what we have once learned and forgotten may be lost from memory but never completely. Remembering and reclaiming what we have forgotten is different from learning for the first time. What we have once learned can never be unlearned.