What Can I Learn From You?

I draw a line with my flat hand, palm facing the ground. I tell my best friend: life looks like this. This I know for sure. She cries. I butcher an explanation of why this, my flat line, is a precious thing. 

 

Years ago my father told me the Taoist parable about the farmer who loses his horse. The farmer’s neighbors deem moments in his life good, bad, lucky, hopeless. But the even-tempered farmer disagrees. He finds that life is a flat line--no good, no bad, no lucky, hopeless, extraordinary, unrecoverable. Life simply is. I find this idea comforting, and have lived by the principle since my father shared it with me. 

 

But a voice on my right interrupts my mediocre explanation: no, life looks like this. Over my flat line, the man next to me draws an imaginary graph that resembles a staircase. Life is an ascent, he says. It’s an ascent when you step back but, close up, it’s all peaks, valleys, plateaus. I consider this. He explains that, no matter how deep the valley or vast the plateau, there is a whole mountain we climbed to get here. And we always climb uphill. 

 

If the “flat line” concept was the prayer I said each morning, this is waking up one day and realizing that I don’t believe in a God: I am unclear about why I know this, but I can feel that it is true. By the time the waitress comes over to clear our plates, she takes with her what I believed to be the very foundation of my life.This jagged line changed everything. 

 

In the same way, my life has been changed by the phrase in Perfect Days, “Next time is next time! Now is now!” and how presently the film’s main character, Hirayama, lives. My life has been changed by the stranger on a train who helped me find my way back to the city I began my nap in. My life has been changed by the Thanksgiving day my father drank coffee from a mug while teaching me to drive. He placed the mug in the cup holder and the black coffee flew. And, yet, not once have I entered a restaurant, movie theater, train, car or conversation looking to leave any fundamentally different than I came.  

 

The first thing you can learn from me is that no belief can resist evolution. The second is that evolution of thought can come from anywhere. 

 

At 21 years old, I only know that I know nothing at all--except that change, this year, will meet me in the form of a college graduation. I can anticipate that, for now, I will leave the classrooms and professors and structure which have been a constant through 17 of my 21 years. I find this change daunting. Yet, the skill in which I have best been educated is how to learn. Therefore, I must write this blog, and I must write it now, because this is the jagged line. This change is life. And, though mine is marked by a commencement, our mountains exist in both grander and subtler forms than a college graduation: the first day of a job, the loss of a relationship, the decision to let go of an old pair of shoes, how we approach sickness, how we approach health, what song to play, who earns our vote. 

 

What Can I Learn From You? navigates life from a perspective that desires guidance, asks questions, prioritizes detail, and connects ideas. The stories here are specific and, ultimately, about perspective; they come from a place that believes that our reality is only as we see it. If the farmer thinks that losing his horse is dire, then losing his horse will be a dire occurrence. If he sees that, in losing his horse, has set it free, then this will be his gift to the animal. 

 

This column is informed by the music, films, books, people, and conversations with which we interact every day. The voices around us shape our outlook--and we already hear them…this blog helps us listen. The writing here rests on the idea that there is little black or white, but instead much more gray. Here I value nuance. And this column holds that anything can change our lives--no matter how mundane the influence or impervious the belief. 

 

This is not a self help column or an instruction manual. I cannot give you answers. I cannot tell you no, don’t take the job that fills your wallet but drains your heart or yes, remind your sister that you love her. Nobody can decide that for you. But I can offer an angle that might help you make the choice. I can share a story that might sound a little bit like yours. 

21 is not the only age at which we question everything. We are lucky that it isn’t. What Can I Learn From You? encourages continued learning by asking, by listening, and by living.