Always Learning

In everything I do in life, I try to learn. Since I get bored very easily, I am in a constant need for new stimuli. The pursuit of new information and new ways to look at old information is inherently fresh, so I can do it forever.

This is why the majority of my writing is exploratory. I write to learn. It is ironic because a finished product sounds authoritative and sure. And, maybe a finished product is authoritative and sure. This blog sounds confident and definite (though I wouldn't call anything here a finished product), and part of it is, but in the writing of it, I am constantly learning.

To come up with an idea from scratch, I need to figure out what I actually care about enough to write on. I need to learn enough about it to have anything worth saying about it and to sound competent when I do speak.

As I start to write about a subject, I am still thinking about it, so I usually come to a realization about the subject in the process of writing (that has got to be the funnest part of writing). For example, my entry about good and evil was almost entirely exploratory. I started with nothing more than seeing that "good" people and "evil" people can do the exact same thing and wondering what the deal was that allowed it. The rest of it unfolded itself as I wrote.

Sometimes, though, what I learn about has nothing to do with the subject at hand. In writing my entries, I've needed to look things up quite often. It could be a fact or a quote or a definition. And it occurs to me that when I have all the world's knowledge at my fingertips, citations aren't as important as they used to be because anybody can go to Google and find out whatever they don't know or understand.

Learning is fun and exciting. It is also an inseparable part of writing. Embrace it and enjoy it.