JULY 19, 2020
Learn and grow. The more you will learn, the more you will grow. Growth is what makes life interesting and curious, so the more you will grow, the more fulfilled you will feel!
-Prabhsimrat Gill
Learning is a very integral part of our being. The greatest ability we have in our lives is the ability to learn. Without learning, there will be no growth and no fulfilment. Without learning, we can’t move forward in our lives. But, do we know what learning really is?
Learning is the ability to understand experiences, stories, things and knowledge, and using it to bring growth and constant improvement in our lives. Learning new things is very important and understanding them even more. By expanding our learning and understanding of new things, we can grow our spectrum of possibilities exponentially.
One of the greatest misconceptions we have been carrying in our lives is that learning is confined to the school and college campuses; beyond that, there aren’t any new things to learn. This statement is far from the truth. The truth is that learning can never be bound to any walls or limits. Learning has no boundaries; the more you learn, the more you expand the possibilities for you to learn even more. Actually, you start learning from the time you are born, even if you might not know it. You observe your surroundings and your environment, and from what you observe, you subconsciously infer and decide your most fundamental values. That is why it is important to consciously keep the environment at home positive and happy from the early days of a child, because that is what will make a strong and positive foundation of good values. Even after school and college life,we continue to learn new things from experiences, books, people and countless other sources; the main power lies in your hands — that is accepting what you are learning or not.
Yes, the greatest power lies within you. You have the choice to absorb whatever you are learning or banish it. You have the power to expand the spectrum of possibilities by exploring new things, and you also have the power to limit your possibilities by keeping yourself stuck in one place only. It is upto you to decide.
Life is always in a constant flux, and to stop learning is like putting an end to that constant flux, and putting an end to growth. To stop growing and to go against the way life works is just like finishing it. When you stop learning and growing, you indirectly end your life by remaining in a constant and monotonous world, where you have the same, limited spectrum of knowledge and possibilities. I doubt that anyone would like to live a repetitive and unchanged life. But, after coming out of college and school, why do most of us stop learning in our lives?
The answer is ego. Our ego prevents us from being the curious child once again. Our ego prevents us from expanding our spectrum of possibilities and expanding our ability to learn, because it makes us believe that we have learned enough and we know everything. It makes us believe that we are ‘the one and only’ who is intelligent, hard-working and knowledgeable. As this ego tells us that we know enough, we stop learning and enter the vicious cycle of monotony, where we don’t just go into hibernation for the winters, but for our lifetime, until and unless we consciously learn and grow.
Dropping our ego isn’t something we find simple, because the ego prevents that too. It takes a simple conscious effort from your side to just listen, observe and seep in new learning, without skipping or saying grantedly, ‘Ha! I already know this! It is just so simple.’ Saying this will trigger a response in your subconscious that you already know this, so it will skip over the important things as well; in the end, you will not learn anything to grow and expand. So, drop your ego and ‘unlearn’ before learning something new. Remove all your perceptions telling you that you know anything about what you are going to learn. This way you will be able to absorb everything you learn, giving you a chance to grow and expand.
Also, don’t let age be a barrier in your growth because even small incidents and children can teach you a lot of important things that will truly help you grow in your life. So, learn from everywhere and everyone, no matter how old, young, new, rusty, or unnoticeable that may have been, because the smallest things in life often teach us the biggest lessons.
Learning is not only grasping knowledge, but understanding and implementing it. If you are just filling yourself with facts and any kind of knowledge without really understanding what growth and learning it is providing you, then you are not learning, and you are not living, you are just a computer filling its space up with data. Understanding is very important for expanding your spectrum of possibilities, way more than grasping knowledge.
Be humble, learn from life, live and grow in the constant flux, expand your spectrum of possibilities and use it to the fullest and you will always be met with happiness and fulfilment…
Thank you for reading!