In Youth We Learn

I know very little about Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach other than her quote "In youth we learn, in age we understand." Being on the more youthful side of that quote, I figure I should place a great emphasis on learning. After all, my life as a student, as an athlete and work-wise is all about learning and training. This stage of my life is entirely focused on learning about a variety of things and as such I learn all sorts of interesting things everyday - from complex mathematical formulae and arcane physics equations through to technical know-how and street smart skills, through findings in sociology and psychology, philosophy and history, bio-mechanics and nutrition; in short, I get exposed to a lot of information which can be really interesting and exceedingly fruitful if applied correctly to my life. Like most people, very little is retained and mostly disconnected facts that can hardly be considered knowledge because oftentimes what has been forgotten is the context that makes facts meaningful.

I am on a learning curve at twenty-one years old. I will probably always be somewhere on the learning curve. But to make the most of the ride I thought I should do something to keep it all in place - and what better way than to make available what I happened to learn as a resource for anyone else to read? So this blog is about putting what I learn each week into words to help me remember it, understand it, be able to explain it...and in the process, help anyone who might chance upon a post they wanted to know more about.

Like I said, I am privileged to be surrounded by a vast array of resources and gifted with a rather wide curiosity (that quite escapes my capacity to learn, most of the time). So nobody should expect any consistent topic; today I was learning about general relativity, David Hume and historical Jesus studies. Yesterday I learnt about army policy on all sorts of things. The day before I was fiddling with tensor maths and learning about swimming biomechanics.

I will not, obviously, blog about every little thing I learn. I will also post much less about mathematics, in part because a lot of learning in maths is found by solving maths problems but far more because I have thus far not found an opportunity to properly sit down and learn how to use any typesetting language that would make writing out all the mathematical symbols a less arduous task. Nonetheless, since I learn a lot about maths all the time, I might end up writing about it. Who knows?

Here's to the pursuit of knowledge through all of life, to learning new things every day and growing from them. Most of all, to follow Lord Acton when he exhorted: "Learn as much by writing as by reading."