Delphic Maxim 121: Do not tire of learning
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
121. Do not tire of learning
My intellectual background is in education. By that I mean that my degree is in teaching (and literature and history, which explains this project a bit), and my PhD is an interesting mix of education, sociology and social theory. At the same time, I have a great books project with my flatmate, where we’re reading through the canon of (mostly Western) literature. On the weekend, my partner and I are enrolling in a French course, and I’ve been engaged on and off for years in inconsistent German learning (I’m bad at it — consistency is key, but I am also persistent).
I am, as we say in the educational literature, a lifelong learner.
Actually, most people are — we never stop learning, it’s built into our DNA. But maintaining an interest and passion for learning is another thing entirely. Even if you’re bad at it (I’m thinking of my German habit), it’s still worth pursuing and never getting tired. Even if, like me, you bounce from one thing to the next because you’re unfocused and poorly disciplined (I’m being crueler to myself than I deserve), at least you are continuing to learn.
Partially, it’s because there are actual physical benefits for your brain. I find it really incredible that simply thinking about something is enough to cause physical changes in your brain! It’s almost like the force from Star Wars — the actual process of rationalising, explaining, memorising and recalling things strengthens synaptic pathways in the brain. You are laying down chemical reactions, reinforcing nerves, and increasing your brain capacity just by thinking about something. That’s quite remarkable, and it’s effective in staving off neural degeneration later in life.
At the same time, continual learning improves the quality of our life, not just physically but socially and emotionally. Reading poetry or literature helps expand our moral horizons. I recently read Martha Nussbaum’s excellent book Poetic Justice, in which she argues that reading literature (she uses Dickens) helps us to build a more empathic understanding of other ways to live, and that this has strong implications for our conception of justice. How incredible is that! A work of fiction can bleed across into the ‘real world’. Anyone who has read a decent novel knows that this is true: imagined worlds change the way we see the real one. They’re character building, both in fiction and in fact.
Learning languages helps us to see and describe the world in different, more complex, more diverse ways. Languages are fundamental to the way we think, they quite literally give voice to our experiences, so learning other ways of thinking is a powerful way to see the world afresh. The same actually goes for the sciences — maths, physics, chemistry, and so on — they help us to understand the processes that govern the physical world. I’ve never been a maths person (not because maths is something people have a natural aptitude for, but because I was always too undisciplined). Earlier this year I read Eddie Woo’s Wonderful World of Maths, and it was seriously good. I never tire of learning, even if it’s a field I didn’t care for previously.
This maxim is one of my favourites, because it actually translates really, really easily into the world today. It’s not about having a side hustle for earning money, but about having an intellectual side hustle for improving your mind. It doesn’t matter whether that’s reading, music, language, or writing: just never tire of learning, because it is so, so good for you.
