Learning and life

Tonight, I realized that there are some important lessons in life that it has taken a longer time for me to learn than I wish were necessary. There are lessons that I think I could have been learned earlier and had a more productive young life with better relationships and a stronger education in life from my family and other adults in my life.

That education came through my own learning curve and many hard knocks and experiences to substitute for something more thoughtful, decent, and preparatory. Ce la vie, I suppose.

But I do very much hope that my experiences will mean for a better education and preparation for life for my children and maybe my students.

There are many regrets that I have had choosing to be a teacher and a scholar. First and foremost, that I intend to correct for, is that I want to build a life that stands on its own completely independent of my words or thoughts or arguments. It is this fact of the life of people like Warren Buffet, Stephen Spielberg, Mark McGwire and others that I admire that I think can be remarkably persuasive beyond any argument. I will build wealth and do work outside of teaching and scholarship, I hope, that can establish this legacy for my life, as well.

But one serious advantage to the life I have now is the ability to reflect on, gain experience, and prepare to raise and educate a family and my children in ways that I could only have wished to experience as a child. My children might not agree. But my eyes and ears will be open to that fact, as well. If I have learned anything as a teacher, a scholar, and just as a person, it is to keep my mind and heart open to possibilities I never considered or imagined before.

I think the role of teachers, scholars, thinkers, and just the larger marketplace of ideas and perspectives, at large, is to quicken that learning curve and to facilitate stronger learning and fundamentals for living and improving contributions to the world, in general.

But it is an advantage that comes with my chosen professions, at this point, that I don't want to lose sight of, as often as I notice places that I wish my parents or teachers had anticipated better such matters of life for me.

Too much of my life has been one long melodrama of integrity and wise living that I wish I oould have avoided with better learning earlier about such matters. I didn't, not early enough, despite some very earnest, honest, and far too ambitious efforts to do so. Those experiences have had a lot of influence on my outlook on people and the world and yielded some fairly powerful insights, I think, into many of our failures as individuals and as liberal democratic and illiberal and undemocratic cultures, I believe. I hope my first book will bear out that belief. We shall see.

In the meantime, I learn. It is often difficult and painful. Too difficult and painful, by far. But I learn nonetheless.

Facilitating that learning on everyone's part is our biggest challenge, I think, including the learning of our brightest neighbors and our most powerful citizens. To do so will involve embracing more freedom, not less, I believe. And it will involve shedding our often narrow, parochial, sectarian, too often self-righteous outlooks seeking all too desperately confirmation of more final truth than we, in fact, could ever possibly have access to. It will involve facing our limitations and opening up the possibilities for ourselves and others to challenge those limitations more honestly and with more possibilities for more people to do so.

What liberal democratic cultures need is more space for learning and for the better lives that comes with that learning.

I hope my own lessons, from failures and successes, can serve some purpose beyond my own life and benefit.