I've been thinking of learning recently like a spiral.
I know Spiral Learning is an established theory in education - credit to Jerome Bruner for that.
What I'm going to talk about here is less an academic theory, and more my own spiritual, emotional, mental and physical experience of spiral learning.
There are the parts of the spiral where it feels like you are leaping from insight to insight and rapidly arcing upwards. There are the tiny, brief plateaus at the top where you think you know all the things. There are the falls from grace, where you toppel off the side and everything you think you knew gets away from you. There is the dark, murky underneath, where you don't know which direction you are going. There is the slither of light, where you take a step back to take a step forward. And then another step up, and another, and you are back on the upward curve again.
Spirals go around and around, so you are going over the same ground but with deeper understanding.
The spirals don't feel like you are moving forward - until you look back and realize how far you have come.
If you reject or stagnate in or refuse to engage with any part of the spiral, you stall at that point and get stuck
If you won't take in new information, you get trapped in a circle which goes around and around but never gets anywhere else.
All the stages of the spiral are necessary in order to continue to grow. The best way to learn faster is to surrender to the process and allow yourself to go around the spiral smoothly again and again.
I'm opening my blog with this metaphor because learning is important to me. And because I want to write about the things I learn. But learning is a process which never ends, and so everything I write will always be wrong, or incomplete or only partway there. Sometimes I'll be insightful, sometimes overconfident, sometimes mistaken, sometimes confused. I'll go back over ground I've covered before, I'll contradict myself, I'll uncover something new. Whatever :D.
All of those things are totally ok.
Thank you for reading, Zoe