Day 4. Keep Learning

April 4, 2020

Refresher Lessons from Drucker, Kubler-Ross and Nietzsche

It took a lockdown to make me go back to different schools of thought. Still processing what is going on internally while resisting the urge to join the high-strung stream of exchanges and endless partisan bashing on social media. In a sort of futile attempt to conduct a little housekeeping on my feed, I cannot help but acknowledge the countless intellectuals in the world and gave up on hitting the ‘Snooze… and ‘Unfollow’ buttons when my thumb started to hurt. In this I am certain I am not an isolated case.

On to today’s Daily Drucker nugget…

Drucker and Kubler-Ross

Growth cannot happen without discomfort.

Learning cannot happen without careful thought.

More than the functional and emotional issues surrounding the world today, I stopped to think about what good there is left to anticipate and expect. There is the motivation to move forward as best as we can day after day, quietness and trust from where hope arises, the support system that gives us guidance and direction and the impact that we can each make within our little quarantined pockets of influence.

I saw a social media post that records the current state of the world for posterity’s sake: from gas prices, to TikTok being the ‘in’ thing, to people working from home. The post that will remind us of this period in our lives every year from now on until Facebook changes its mind and removes Memories from its list of features. And then I caught myself anticipating April 4, 2021, and this entry will have aged a year and would be, by then, an outdated piece of evidence of how frail life truly is for everyone no matter how advanced our technology becomes, and how temporary discomfort can be once man learns to accept and to adjust to the changing times.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I picked this up for inspiration. I did not need any more convincing that this is one of those books tucked away in my memory bank, reminding me of college and the smell of our non-air-conditioned study hall and our much cozier library. I selected this out of the pack because I want to imagine myself walking around the city for miles or taking a hike and enjoying every moment without watching the number of steps or the calories I burn. More of a mental, emotional and spiritual exercise in one.

Let me leave you with this quote from Nietzsche as I pray for the day we all get to enjoy the outdoors again:

“Let him be educated enough to think little of his own education, to think scornfully even; then he can confidently follow the lead of an author who ventures to address him only from a place of ignorance, a perspective of knowing that he does not know.”