Moving Inward: Cycles of Reinvention
How one’s own learning metabolism impacts everything
I always find many similarities between eating and learning. Ingesting — whether it’s knowledge or food — takes time to process and distribute. They are both necessary for humans to continue to exist. In many ways, eating is a form of visceral learning, where the body learns and relearns its relationship with food in different contexts. First, humans probably learned what to eat and what not to — that may or may not have served as the primitive basis for open knowledge and forbidden knowledge (which could be poisonous for the uninitiated). Some foods are good for us, but others can harm us, even though they taste nice. Let’s take, for instance, news (there’s hardly anything new in the pattern of news, though). News is supposed to inform and connect us with the world; it’s an espresso shot more than something you’d normally have to chew on- “a shot of reality.” But take too much, and you’ll soon have an increased heart rate, sickening anxiety, tremors, and regret of overdoing it.
Now, perhaps more than before, it’s the quantity we need to watch out for since it’s so accessible. We don’t learn from quantity; our minds and bodies have a limited capacity that requires careful measuring of how much we put in. After all, food poisoning is not referring only to eating poisonous food but simply eating too much.
Why am I beginning with this story?
As part of the Strategic Exploration I got to do so far, I’ve come to the realization that all of this applies to how I learn. Pausing and waiting for the lessons to sink in and then getting hungry again is a healthy way of learning, especially when some of the things I’ve got to learn had slightly new ingredients that I wasn’t sure of how my mind was going to react to.
The next stage of the Strategic Exploration will be called Moving Inward because I’ve established or actually re-established a new relationship with learning.
This is a temporary departure point from the Collaborative Learning highlighted previously:
“Learners may have different paces, given their prior knowledge, skills, and motivations/objectives. Unlike taking a course together where we are all learning the same thing, Collaborative Learning is a way of testing knowledge among each other to strengthen our own course.”
Moving Inward is not about disconnecting from the external world and meditating in a space removed from everything else. I believe it to be a key component of the learning process. Let’s simply call this Inward Learning and define it as the complex ability to build meaningful connections between different aspects of you and the world and the world of others.
Inward Learning is, in fact, an activity system, and that is why it can’t possibly work in a vacuum — it’s interdependent and continuously rewiring.
However, note that I use the word resonate, which refers to the property of “echoing” or resounding a vibration that it recognizes as compatible or similar. Learning requires similarity, not sameness — as I briefly touched on the idea of “breaking symmetries” as a necessary act to grow and learn new skills. Not everything carries a positive charge, smoothly echoing our learning intent. It’s an intricate web of happenings that, for the sake of cognitive exploration and inspired by
’s awesome work on themes, I’ll refer to them as a network of themes:
Understanding that there’s an inherent structure and order to how we learn is essential to Inward Learning.
On the one hand, certain themes fall into a relationship, and our power to navigate them helps us build connections between them despite not knowing everything there is to know to fill the missing parts. We rely on those connections to strengthen the network between themes and trust that we will not fall into the knowledge gaps by mistake.
On the other hand, we often have to create connections where there aren’t, especially when engaged with new knowledge. Taking a leap of fate from one theme to another is an exciting way of experimenting with your internal learning scaffold. What happens to the knowledge gaps, then? We continue to live with them until we manage to enrich the network of themes and create a fabric of knowledge that is thick enough to support real and impactful transformation outside ourselves.
Inward Learning is a form of Self-weaving and appreciating how knowledge alters our perception and mental chemistry.
Our Learning body grows and begins to resonate with others, similar to wise people or certain experts who just “do themselves,” not necessarily preaching anything. Sharing knowledge is a certain way of being, but not doing it at this point.
Now, where am I going with all this, and what does that have to do with the title — Cycles of Reinvention?
With Oliver’s help, I considered Strategic Exploration as a main theme to pursue this year. However, it wasn’t clear to me what it meant to work with a primary theme and the method of slow cognition he proposed. To my understanding the two can be roughly mean:
Primary Theme: dedicating your activity space to the pursuit of Strategic Exploration
Slow cognition: track reflection and developments using a blend of historical and cognitive discourse method
In order to incorporate this new practice into my activity sphere and give it the right position, I had to consider how I split my life and what challenges arose from this project. First, I do not define my life as one activity space but as a blend of states in context.
There are three relevant spaces when it comes to learning:
- Non-activity: brain at rest, idle.
- Loose activity: leisure, broad uncommitted exploration, still learning but not bound to performance, not have to lead to action
- Focused activity: intensive work that requires a high level of effort and commitment.
To continue the food analogy (non-activity is basically not eating, staying empty/hungry; loose activity is like drinking coffee and snacks between meals; focused activity is eating a full-fledged meal).
In relationship to the Network of Themes and the Activity Spaces, I believe that it’s becoming clearer I don’t work with primary or secondary themes all the time since I’m not an academic researcher or a knowledge worker that requires this type of hierarchy. However, I can “count” the themes I work with and alter them as I continue to learn and strengthen the connections between them to create that fabric. Inward Learning is perhaps a form of slow cognition but departs from it at a time to simply be idle and experience without the expression of thoughts what transformations are undergoing. The three Activity Spaces makes learning a transformative and rich experience as they all encourage different ways of learning.
The belief that holds me on this path is simple: how I feel is more important than how I think because most thoughts are by-products of my internal turmoils. I may be wrong, but I’m able to express it now here.
Until the next reinvention cycle!
