A Love Letter to Learning

March 2024 (556 Words, 4 Minutes)

Dear Learning,

First of all, I don’t even know what to refer to you as. Should I address you as “the process of learning” or “didacticism” or just “learning”? For now, I’ll just call you the first one, because you truly are a process. And a very enjoyable one, I’ll tell you that.

It’s just inherently enjoyable to absorb new information because of you, even if it isn’t applicable anywhere. For example, in my theater classes, I still listen and take pleasure from the concepts taught even though it’s not in my future career path. I don’t know what it is about you. Maybe it’s that you make me think. Or just that you’re interesting. Or that you allow me to expand my repository of knowledge to something bigger. Maybe it’s the experience of sharing it with others who love to go in depth about something we are learning (there’s your name). But it does not matter exactly what attracts me to you, other than the experience you give me.

I often see that school is a despised institution by many, but I see it differently because of you. Talking to and breathing you on a daily basis is an indescribable experience, and processing you in a variety of subjects is even more so. It’s considered weird to love you in a school setting as much as I do, but I embrace the nerdiness that you are inherently part of. There’s always new information to process and digest, but the real magic is in the procedure that you facilitate. Learning so many different things, and it may sound corny, carries such a value to me because of how I can think about and link them together. I always hear from your detractors: “Why do we have to learn history?” or “I’m never going to use this in the future.” To that, I’m not going to say that learning many of these things is essential to discovering your passion, though that is true in some senses. It’s that you bring out curiosity and discovery in a person who goes through your process, with different dimensions of virtues unwrapped in different disciplines and fields. That is why those who love you hunger to go through life and apply you to so many things!

Books. In fiction, their stories may not be real, but is still driven in part by a spirit of you embodied. The very act of wanting to learn about characters and places that one doesn’t even know and won’t experience is a direct consequence of you. Again, the spirit of uncovering a novel story is inherent with you, and is what gets us bookworms and dark academics in love with these narratives and magical lands. As is our desire to extract lessons and themes through these stories. It’s a bit of a meme with English teachers and analyzing books, but it is a beautiful thing to think about books in these ways; maybe not word by word, but the bigger picture of the book as a whole. I feel that there’s inherent value in doing that, but why is that the case? It’s all you and the will you put in the people that love you to do so.

I’d like to end off this little letter of mine by saying a few things. Fans of you (including me, of course) may be called boring and nerdy, but we don’t care one bit. It doesn’t matter to me if it isn’t that deep or a waste of time, I’ll still love you forever, especially with new things. There’s so much out there to learn but so little time to absorb it all, and that fact both saddens and enlightens me. I’ll never get to experience the entire pool of knowledge available with you, but what we do get to know is ever more valuable because of that. If you weren’t limited in our lifetime, you wouldn’t have as much value (at least that is what I feel). So I’m glad that I get to learn the things I do with you in my life. You’re the opposite of boring; we’re literally being introduced to novel and interesting things with you. It’s incomprehensible how cool that is!

Sincerely,

th3hat3d

P.S: The other best part of you is when I find others that love you just as much (if not more) as I do! Learning lovers forever!