The Perpetual Classroom

I don’t know about you, but the day I don’t learn something new is a day totally wasted. First of all, I seem to have been born with a profound curiosity about life, particularly about what makes people tick. I am also fascinated with the mechanics of the world around me. I may not be a scientist, per say, but I find that the pace of new scientific discoveries that I read about daily keeps me in a constant state of wonder, wonder about what they will come up with tomorrow and the day after.

I kind of laugh when thinking back of just how little I knew the day I graduated from the university. I would be surprised if I currently use one percent of the engineering subjects I studied in my everyday work. Almost every bit of knowledge I find useful in my engineering profession, and in life in general, was taught to me experientially. I could try to claim that I graduated with a blank slate, but that wouldn’t really be true either. The fact is I had a head full of mush, and worthless information, and was fooled into thinking I actually knew something.

I can’t fault the university. The college of engineering did the best they could. They taught me the basics of engineering, and virtually nothing about the basics of life. It was a case of majoring in the minors, and minoring in the majors as far as I am concerned. Only after struggling with life for many years that I began to realize how profoundly ignorant I was about the rules of life. I had no idea what it meant to be human, and wasn’t all that sure what it took to be happy.

That realization was key to me becoming involved in several of the major self-awareness and human potential programs during the 1980’s and 90’s including “Life Spring” and “The Forum.” I got heavily involved in those programs, taking most of the courses offered, and even became involved in leadership training for a while. Each of those programs are intended to be intense, and they are, but from my standpoint, they offered me insight into the question, “What does it mean to be human?” This is a fundamental question that I think all of us need to explore. It is not a trivial question.
 
Someone once said, many of us have minds like concrete, totally mixed up and permanently set. We know what we know, or at least think we do, and are in no way open to looking at things in any other way than the way we know. Many of us cling to our beliefs as if they are a life raft, holding them to be beyond questioning. I, for one, believe that all of our fundamental beliefs need to be questioned. Another way of putting it is that the questions we raise in life are far more important than any answers we come to.
 
Another major influence in my life, something that taught me a lot about myself and life in general, was the death of my first wife.  I can’t even begin to describe how difficult those six years between the time she was diagnosed with cancer and the time she died were for me, but out of that period came a lot of introspection.  My attitude about everything in life changed as a result.  My values changed.  My relationship to life changed.

My wife was a fighter, with a will to live stronger than any person I have ever known.  Her battle to live life on her own terms in spite of the cancer were an inspiration to those who knew her.  She refused to give up even after I had long since conceded defeat.  It is not easy watching someone I knew and loved die day by day before my eyes, but the disease was relentless.  Before she finally passed away, she had been admitted to the hospital seventy-five times.

Even with medical insurance, the medical bills were gargantuan.  We went from having two major incomes down to one, since she could no longer work.  I really struggled to keep our heads above water during that time.  I know the medical bills were over $100,000 a year, and I have no idea how I managed to stay afloat during that period.  I didn’t enjoy any of it, but I felt I had no choice in the matter.  Somehow I managed, but it certainly wasn’t easy.

My wife endured a brutal combination of chemotherapy and radiation, none of which seemed to slow the disease down.  It was omnipresent from the moment it was detected in her ear canal.  My guess is that someday they will look at the common medical practices of today with regards to cancer as barbaric at best, the treatment often being worse than the disease.  This is one area, the treatment of cancer, where I expect rapid advances in the future.  I believe all the research being done will eventually pay off, hopefully in my life time.

One primary lesson I learned from her death was that none of us are guaranteed a tomorrow.  As a result of that experience, I decided to live life with a vengeance, to make each day count, to never assume that I would have a second chance.  I also learned I was a lot stronger than I thought I was, and that I could endure just about anything.  One thing for sure, I did not want to grow old without having a life worth remembering.  I need to be able to seize opportunities whenever and wherever they present themselves.  I never wanted to suffer the regrets of having things I failed to do while I had a chance.

I discovered out of this experience that one of the most important abilities we have as human beings is the power of rationalization.  A big part of the healing process is the rational decision that whatever happened had to happen, and that somehow, someway, it was a necessary part of my overall educational process.  Sometimes it takes a while to come to terms with, or rationalize, something like that, at least it did for me.  In fact, it took years.

One of the most vivid reminders of the power of rationalization came about while I was volunteer teaching at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles some time after my wife’s death.  I had three students in one of the classes I was leading.  Each student had gone blind at a different point in their life, and each had made peace with their own blindness, concluding that the time they lost their eyesight was the absolute best time to lose their eyesight.  One lost her vision when she was sixty-five years old, and she figured she had already seen all she needed to see by that time, so losing her eyesight was no big deal.  Another lost his vision when he was seventeen, and never had to work a day in his life as a consequence.  He thought that seventeen was the perfect age to lose his eyesight.  Another student had been blind since birth, so she had no idea what she was missing, and was perfectly content with that.

Incidentally, I found doing volunteer work to be an excellent way of getting outside my inner turmoil .  There were always others seemingly less fortunate than myself to serve, and quite often, they had something valuable they could teach me about life as well.  Whenever I got too wrapped up in the issues and challenges of my life, volunteering tends to puts things in a better perspective. 

Over the years I have been involved a number of volunteer programs.  I was a US Peace Corps volunteer right after college.  At the time, I was burned out with school, and not ready to pursue my master’s degree.  I was even less ready for finding and working a normal job.  It was the perfect solution for me.  For a while, I was involved with Food Share there in Southern California.  I did a lot of photography work for them documenting their operations and food distribution services. While I was involved in the human potential movement, I did a lot of volunteer work for them as well.  I have also done volunteer English language teaching overseas, and found that I enjoyed that too.  Life simply has more meaning when I am involved with others.  People are a necessary part of my life.  Being of service is what I am all about.

I spent a couple years in Turkey teaching English as a foreign language on a part time basis. Most of the students were university student or adults. One thing I noticed in the discussions I had with the students was that a very small percentage of them had ever done any volunteer work of any kind. What was distinctly missing was the sense of community that volunteering tends to generate.

The people in Turkey were going through a particularly tough time economically. Unemployment was at around 17%, as I recall, and even higher for young college graduates. There were very few jobs to be had, especially in the city of Adana. Many of the students were being trained in fields that had virtually dried up, like textile engineering. There was an obvious detachment from practicality, and a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that pervaded the graduates, a crushing apathy about life.

I tried to encourage the students to consider doing volunteer work to get some practical experience, if nothing else. They basically had a choice. They could stay at home and feel sorry for themselves, or they could get some work experience that could possibly lead to future employment.

Part of the problem is that most students have no practical life experience. This is largely true of college graduates everywhere. They spent four or five years getting educated only to discover that they knew practically nothing about anything. They didn’t even know how to go about getting a job, or for that matter, what constitutes practical experience. They don’t know the basics of writing a resume. They have no sense of what they have to offer.

Most college graduates in Turkey spend several years after graduating trying to find work of any kind. The old system of waiting for their parents to find them a position through their contacts simply no longer works for most students. Their parents simply don’t have the contacts necessary. The old system of nepotism does not work in a complex modern technological society.

What I encouraged all the students to do was to identify the field they think they want to go into, and next to identify the key players in that field. They need to figure out what companies are doing what type of work, and which ones are the best to go to work for. I explained to them that in any given field, there are probably not more than 10 leaders in the whole country that are the movers and the shakers in their given field, the ones who determine the future of their industry. Those are the people and companies they need to identify, and focus on getting to know.

If doing volunteer work is a part of their pre-employment tactics, they need to figure out where the best place to volunteer would be. I am well aware that there is a major “Catch 22” in that they are dealing with in that companies will not hire them unless they have experience, and they can’t get experience unless a company will hire them. They could spend years trying to figure out which comes first, the chicken or the egg, and many of them do to no avail.

The first thing I wanted the students to know is that they weren’t as helpless as they feel, that they can do something to enhance their chances of securing a good position with an up and coming company. If a students wants to be a doctor, great, do some volunteer work at a local hospital. Hospitals are always looking for volunteers. If they want to work for a bank, try doing some volunteer work for one of them. If they want to work for the government, there are many government functions performed regularly by volunteers.

At least for me, teaching English was of secondary importance. Teaching about life was of primary importance. Besides, the only reason there were so many students studying English was that they hoped it might lead to more job possibilities.

Most of us don’t have a lot of skills at creating jobs out of nothing. It is easy to look out at the world and see all the problems. There are problems everywhere. It takes vision to see the opportunities inherent in the problems, and an attitude to see oneself as capable of doing something about them. If the students have both vision and attitude, they will seldom, if ever, be out of work. There is so much work to be done.

After returning to the US from Turkey, I ended up moving to Mountain Home, Arkansas to live with my brother. One thing I picked up on immediately was the powerful pride and sense of community of the people there. It is a small town of about 12,000 people, but there was a spirit about the people there generated by,or a product of, one of the highest volunteer rates in the entire country.

The place and the people fascinated me. I began a project interviewing the people of the community and capturing their life story. I was trying to get at the interwoven nature of the community fabric. I person had a unique story of how they became a part of that fabric, and what it meant to them. It was like looking at the essence of the community through a hundred different lenses. In three months I had interviewed fifty -seven people, and collected enough material for a rather heathy book, one that I will someday publish.

The idea occurred to me that I could find the same essence in any community I looked at. What lies at the heart and the sole of a community? There are a billion similar stories out there to be told, each one unique and somehow revealing of what it is to be human. Loving to write, this is something I could do anywhere I chose. Someday I will.


My writing career began in earnest with the death of my first wife. Her death led to a period of deep personal introspection.  To wade through the turmoil of my emotions, I began reviewing the experiences of my life, and writing down some of the stories and observations. One thing that helped me was when I discovered that poetry doesn’t necessarily need to rhyme.  I couldn’t stand force or contrived rhyme, and that had always prevented me from expressing myself in poetic form.  Freed of that constraint, I came up with a form of prose I call a narrative reflection that seemed to work for me.

For the next four years, I spent at least one hour a day writing, and at the end of that time, I had written seven books. I spent the next ten or fifteen years editing them, yet never got a single one of them published. I printed a few copies that I lent out to friends and acquaintances, enough to test the market and know that my work could potentially be popular if I ever get it to the market. One of my dreams is to someday become a full time writer.

I was always an avid reader until I started writing. Once I started writing, it didn’t seem like I had time to read other people’s writing. I have learned this much about myself however, if I am not reading regularly, either my own writing or that of others, something dries up inside, affecting the depth and quality of my conversations. Reading provides diversity which in turn leads to more interesting conversations. I get bored talking about the same thing over and over again. I thrive on diversity.

On thing that working overseas, as I am doing now, gives me is more time. Even if I am working 10 to 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, I still have far more time to kill than I ever did working and living in the States. The important question is what do I do with that time. I suppose I am fortunate in that I have this opportunity to feed my curiosity, to read, and to write. A lot of people working in this type situation don’t really know what to do with all the time they have, and resort to gambling or drinking to keep themselves busy. Otherwise they quickly fall apart.

I have fortunately also discovered the world of on-line education. I can find classes on almost every subject imaginable, and can take those classes at my own pace. I don’t really care if the colleges are accredited or not I am fascinated in the course, and taking it only because I am interested. This is so much better than formal college enrollment, at least for me. I like to cultivate my mind, and the programs are quite inexpensive.

One of the things that is a drag in any professional career is that technology changes, forcing people to continually study just to keep up. A person can quickly become a dinosaur if they are not up on the latest, greatest tools of the trade, and they are always changing. The online courses allows a person to keep up.

For myself, I grew up in an age before AutoCAD drafting, even before personal computers, for that matter. I am always seeing new job listings with skill sets and qualifications I simply don’t have, just because those things weren’t available when I was going through school. With the on-line courses, I can gain the new skills I need easily.

I also recognize that I need a balance between job, recreation, exercise, reading, and studying. I am not a perpetual student in the sense that I am in school all the time, though in reality, I am. I am a life long student of the “School of Hard Knocks.” I find I can’t study indefinitely without some very specific goal in mind, and without periodic breaks and physical activity. Too much work and not enough play makes Jack a very bored boy.

Personal discipline is an important factor, however. Many of us can want to study, and do a lot of different things, but we don’t have the discipline to keep at it, or the knowledge of ourself to set a reasonable pace that we can live with. I have always been very cognizant of my need to get out and away from work. It helps prevent burn out. Burnout destroys more professional careers than anything else.