the thrills of learning

You’d think that getting better at something would make doing it easier, but here’s the paradox I’m going to stick right in your face: it doesn’t. In fact, it just gets harder. Your gaze has fixed itself on a steep slope somewhere towards a place in the sky, but after taking a few steps, you bump into something, before realising that it is the frame of your own work still down below where you stand (or maybe, float, a few feet off the ground). You fall into the habit of discounting the baby steps you take to move forward and forget to glance back every once in a while to see how far you’ve come.

I’m lost again; periods of total clarity are short-lived, and although I know that it’s by this way that I grow, it isn’t always easy. I’d thought that I’d spend the summer sharpening my skills,  train myself so that I’ll be able to look back and see a huge leap in improvement. Instead, experience caused the distance from where I was to the horizon to lengthen and I ended up rejecting one of the very things that hold my heart. So I started running. I’m good at running, escaping by sinking myself between the pages where I breathed in oceans of printed words. But even that wasn’t quite the same and I needed the strongest fictions with the heaviest anchors to keep me submerged.

It took learning something totally new (I found the post which the link leads to just minutes after I wrote this!) for me to remember the trill of learning. The ‘wow, I know how to do this now!’ feeling that goes in with the new breath of air you suck in, eyes widened in awe of your new capability. 

I think I’ve managed to trained myself to write only when I’m in better feeling moods in hope of creating more uplifting sentences, as opposed to just producing rants. I don’t really know what I’ll think when I look back on these passages, but anyhow, this journey is life and what I’ll continue is grow.