change... to make a decision that will redirect the course of future events.

a migrating urban goose flies for days, ever higher into the clouds, finding slipstreams and favorable winds to accelerate its progress; in one fateful instant, it finds itself sucked into the intake of a supersonic jet on a three-hour voyage across the Atlantic Ocean...

in the past, the concept of personal freedom was always connected to the amount of time available. "available" meaning open for anything, everything and nothing. the rationale, on some level, was that if there were no pressures to actually do anything, that would indicate that the time spent in the midst of activity would have to be more productive.

on some level, that logic held a certain appeal. in the days when autodidactism seemed the only path to learning, yes. intense study, time spent thinking about ideas, allowing creativity to take its course. after a lifetime spent in opposition to every education authority available, there seemed to be few other viable choices.

in the past year and a half, however, this has revealed itself not to be true. as the realm of technology becomes less and less professionally interesting, it becomes clear that most other vocations require educational creditionals. after throwing darts at a cluster of related career choices, the present one found itself in the bulllseye. hence, school.

immediately upon setting foot into the first lecture class, one issue became painfully apparent. a latent fear of not being able to learn.

not being able to learn. how is that possible? it wasn't a question of being "smart" enough. it wasn't an issue of motivation... and for the first time, the educational establishment actually seems interested in the students rather than just the statistical mean of pass/fail and GPA. the problem, then, was something far more intrinsic to the way rather than the what.

the learning styles of other people never seemed to make sense. regurgitation of empty facts, solutions to equations for the sake of passing exams... is it really learning if the knowledge is forgotten immediately after the testing period ends?

more frustrating, though, was the feeling that learning was a slower process than it seemed. if data would be formed into a personal sense of information, then transformed into individually learned knowledge, the process itself would have to be inherently different from the cookie-cutter "cramming for success" approach that seems to be at least tacitly condoned -- if not implicitly expected -- by most educational command structures. and so learning has gradually become a puzzle, a riddle of sorts.

if learning is not something done quickly, not something done on command, not something to be forgotten as soon as it is digested, what is it?

and the answer, until quite recently, seemed to be immersion and waiting. immersion in the sense of surveying as much of a field or issue as possible. piling the memory high with possible points of reference and interpretative horizons. making it impossible to forget due to the assimiliation of so much data. sleep would take care of the rest; most connections seemed to be unconscious anyway.

a time-consuming approach, to say the least.

looking forward, now, there must be a more condensed way to learn. time becomes shorter, attention more precious and required for so many more questions. the question is no longer whether learning quickly is possible, but rather, how to learn meaningfully in a short period of time -- without becoming a mindless regurgitator of facts...

elaboration. repetition. overlearning. what part does creativity play in all of this? what a strange question. perhaps if sleep holds the answer to the meaningful combination of ideas, dreams can manifest a means of interacting with those ideas.

dreams. expanded focus... open curiosity rather than obsessive concentration.

to play the opposite... worth a shot. perhaps the tension headaches will dissipate, if only a smidgen.

audio: repair . forgive & forget [richard davis remix]