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I've always thought it's important to learn something significant in each decade of life. In my 20s I started teaching and doing long-distance bicycling trips.
by japhyr 6y ago
I've always thought it's important to learn something significant in each decade of life. In my 20s I started teaching and doing long-distance bicycling trips. In my 30s I moved from NYC to Alaska, and started doing mountain rescue work. In my 40s I started writing and learned to drive a boat on the ocean. That was intimidating in a fishing town, where it feels like everyone else has known how to drive a boat since they were three years old.
In my 50s I hope to learn a musical instrument, although that's a couple years away so who knows what's in store then.
Learning something new keeps us young and humble, and engaged. It also connects us with people outside our current bubble. People talk about our minds becoming less elastic as we age, but that's offset by practice at learning new things. I do think it's good to learn things with some element of risk from time to time; it's part of what keeps us sharp, and forces us to evaluate our own competency level.
What are you interested in learning?
- kingkongjaffa 6y agoYou are very interesting! How did you decide what you wanted to do at each juncture?
- japhyr 6y agoWhen I finished undergrad I started teaching middle school, and after two years of teaching I finally had a summer off with zero obligations. I had read A Walk Across America, about a guy who walked across the US. It sounded fascinating but it took him several years. So I settled on biking, because you can get all the way across the US on a bike in a summer. I did that a couple times, and then spent a year living on a bike. I rode from Seattle to Maine (through northeastern Canada), down to Florida, over to California, and ended in Alaska. That led me to move to Alaska a few years later, which led to mountain rescue work. Teaching led to writing. Living in a coastal fishing town led to boating. Each adventure leads to the next. :) I wouldn't want to live forever, but I'd happily live a thousand years and spend ten years on a hundred different things.
- gcanyon 6y agoSerious question: do you think there are only 100 things that would be interesting to learn?
- japhyr 6y agoNo. It's a simple way of saying I'd love to live longer than a human lifetime, but would never want to be immortal.
- vram22 6y agoCool. I read A Walk across America, in serial form (2 parts) in the National Geographic magazine, long ago. It was great, and the first time I heard of the concept of such a long journey on foot, although I knew about people driving across America. It was fairly common in those days when gas was much cheaper. Some of my older relatives settled in the US had done it too, and used to tell us kids about it. A couple of points I remember are him guzzling a liter or more of soft drinks at a stop after a long walk on a hot summer day, and his stay with and warm welcome by an African American family. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_Across_America https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_Across_America https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jenkins_(travel_author) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jenkins_(travel_author...
- Grazester 6y agoQuestion. It is normal to say drive a boat? My father was a sea captain for his entire life and never used the word drive. I also grew up around fishermen and being onboard when they were in port,them like my dad used the word steer or captain.
- scottmey 6y ago“Pilots a boat”, is what I was taught.
- japhyr 6y agoHere in southeast Alaska, I usually hear people say "drive". For example if people are talking about a somewhat sketchy or tense return from a trip, you might ask them "Who was driving?" I never hear anyone say "Who was captain?" or "Who was steering?" "Captain" seems to imply a title, and "steering" sounds like you just took the wheel for a moment. That may be different for people who spend a lot of time on commercial boats. When I've been in formal settings, say on a police boat while doing search and rescue work, we will talk about the person who is filling the role of captain. But we still say that person is "driving" the boat.
- megameter 6y agoI specifically remember seeing this distinction in, of all things, a 40's war-era Superman comic, where an everyman G.I. character tasked with truck driving was told, "anyone can steer - we need drivers!" Which makes me believe "drive" probably is nautical in origin and then corrupted through casual usage in automotive transit, where steering and driving are more often equated.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tomcam 6y agoMaybe not. Long before there were cars, the people who held the reins of a carriage were called drivers. They were literally driving the horses forward. So too the mule drivers