Learning and Unlearning

My days have become suddenly interesting. For reasons I don’t have room to explain here, I’m spending my mornings at a local preschool. In the halls and classrooms, wide eyes and runny noses abound. Because it’s all so new, what I’m most keenly aware of is the vast amount of learning going on around me. One class is learning about the letter T for the first time, while another is listening to a visitor teach about how to take care of one’s teeth. Even when they’re left to themselves - playing with playdough, racing toy cars, or looking at picture books - they’re learning, and I can’t help but want to follow their example. I want to learn something new, too. 

This morning, however, was the day I leave the preschool and go sit with my therapist for an hour. Under her care, I’m unwrapping my life and looking at all the ways I’ve learned to cope with the world surrounding me. We recently reached a point in our work where she said, “OK, here’s where the fun begins.” What she meant was we’d reached a moment of truth. I would have to look at important things and unlearn some long-practiced ways of thinking and behaving. 

Driving away from the session, I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between of the two worlds. In one, it’s all about learning. In the other, it’s all about unlearning. Rather than pick, I know that the balanced life I desire is found somewhere between the two. 

Like the children, I want to open my eyes wide, regardless of my age, and learn something new every day. I want to look at things and people with wonder, as if for the first time, and learn something I’ve never known. 

I also want to unlearn just as much as I learn. Maybe it’s a story I’ve told myself for years, an opinion that’s given me comfort, or a behavior that always makes people laugh. Whatever it may be, I want to live slowly enough, deliberately enough, to “catch myself in the act”, as a mentor once said, and try something new. In other words, I want to unlearn. 

Like a skater on ice, I want to push with one leg, then push with the other. Learn. Unlearn. Learn. Unlearn. Slowly, I believe, I’ll begin to move forward.

Progress, Not Perfection

Today is my birthday, not my bellybutton birthday, as they refer to it in AA, but my sobriety birthday. It’s a day I truly appreciate and embrace, unlike my other one, and it always invites me to sit back and reflect.

AA is known for many sayings, like One day at a time and Easy Does It, but the one I love most is Progress, not Perfection. It reminds me, not just on my sobriety date but every day, that the journey I’m on is not about doing it perfectly, but doing it, one day at a time, to the best of my ability. The journey is the point, putting one foot in front of the other is what really matters.

Such wisdom extends far beyond recovery. It applies to our work and our relationships. It speaks to parents and children, alike, and also echoes across every pew of every faith community in the land, or at least it should.

My fear is that we’re surrounded by an endless call for perfection. Sports announcers always ask whether an athlete is the “best of all time,” as if to imply anything less is a failure. Such a perspective is found elsewhere. It seems as if everyone measures the people, places and things of his or her life in much the same way. Perfection has become a drug, one that clouds our vision and pollutes our hearts. It rises above like an insurmountable wall, leaving those of us standing below with no other choice but to quit and walk away.

What a gift to be told that life is about progress, not perfection. Suddenly, there’s hope. Suddenly, there’s breathing room for those who are doing the best we can. Suddenly, we can be the best good-enough parents we can, best good-enough co-workers or friends, and best good-enough people of faith. The wall becomes a gate, welcoming us to enter and walk beside one another as fellow sojourners. 

It’s such a special gift, a life-giving gift, one might be tempted to call it perfect. I’ll just call it divine.

Walking the Trail

(With apologies to, and appreciation for, Clive Staples Lewis)

 There it was, the actual Appalachian Trail. The sign beside the road said so. With great excitement, I pulled over and went to walk on this famous trail that leads from Georgia to Maine. I have read countless books about the AT and dreamt of hiking it from one end to the other. 

With reverence, I approached the small, unassuming entrance into the woods. Without the sign I would have missed it. I knew in my mind it was just like any other trail I’d hiked, but because it was the AT something caused me to feel as if I was processing down the aisle of a cathedral. It was a memorable moment, and I reflected on it long after returning to my car.

Until that afternoon, I had only read about the AT and studied maps. Now I had actually experienced it, if only for a mile or too. Part of me wanted to choose which was better, first-hand experience or the cumulative experiences of the great cloud of hikers who’d written books and drawn maps.

I think I live in that tension, spiritually. Surrounded by books, rituals and creeds, my heart longs for first-hand experience, and I feel I’ve had a few but they were brief and always left me longing for more. Without someone coming before putting out a sign, I might have missed such experiences, or passed them off as coincidences. Without the books, rituals, and creeds, I’d never know the magnitude of the trail, nor learn about the nature of the entire adventure. 

Fortunately, countless others have taken the time to map out what they’ve seen, who they’ve come to know, as well as the successes they’ve had and mistakes they’ve made. Somehow, their work helps me make sense of the mile or two I will experience in my life. 

Like so many things, it’s not an either/or proposition, but a both/and. So I’ll continue to go for walks and open my heart for God’s whispers, but I’ll also read my many books and go to church so my heart knows what, or who, it’s looking for.