What if learning was a journey and not a place to get to? What if there’s no target benchmarks of grades, no exams to sit for, and just a practice to get better? The beauty of the modern society and system is that we’ve created so many different scaffolding structures to help us learn and be better that we forgot what we were doing them for. We had created so many milestones along a journey so that we can walk it, so much so that we now care only for the milestones but not the journey itself.
So when we join a class to learn something, we want a certificate; we think we don’t need the peer support, the social pressure, the breaks and banter. We think it’s about the training, the content and the knowledge. We forget the interactions, the joy of learning and being uncomfortable.
What can we do to keep reminding ourselves it is a journey and we want to be in the place of tension, to be emotionally committed to the work of learning? How can we see the discomfort as a journey we embark on to be better and get better than one we want to get done and over with?