The Perpetual Motion Machine

Human beings are constantly in motion. This struck me particularly as I was doing a little people-watching the other day, observing a man waiting at a bus stop across the street from me. Even in the very passive act of waiting, he was remarkably active. His eye followed various and sundry diversions in his field of view. He wandered from one end of the sidewalk to the next, looking now at a pile of construction debris, now at a swarm of ants crawling out of a crack in the concrete. All the time he furrowed his brow, shook his head, smiled, traversing a broad range of emotions while merely waiting for the bus to arrive. I can only begin to imagine what he was puzzling over that particular day as he waited.

We are a restless species. Even the most sedentary of people I have ever known was constantly engaged in some kind of activity - playing a video game, watching a movie, reading a book, pondering endless minutiae. We commonly think of sleep as a moment of perfect rest, but even in the act of sleeping our eyes twitch beneath our eyelids, our limbs move involuntarily, and our mind races through fantasies both wonderful and terrifying. Two nights ago I was working on my blog and my little cocker spaniel, Samson, fast asleep, began to emit a wail more soulful than I have ever heard from him in his waking state. Surely he could not be said to have been inactive at that time. And that's just accounting for our mental and physical activity.

There is also a vast array of behaviors that our body engages in without our knowledge or consent. The energy that we consume is allocated to a distribution range that includes our physical activity, the heat produced from digestion and absorption of foods, and our Basal Metabolic Rate (which accounts for all of the activities that occur within our body simply to keep it functioning - to repair and renew body tissues, fight diseases, etc). The Basal Metabolic Rate accounts for the lion's share of the energy that we consume and expend. That is to say, we burn the majority of our calories without even being aware that we are doing so. In short, we are remarkably efficient at keeping ourselves occupied.

Consider me, sitting here writing this post at this moment. Even as I am doing so, I am crossing and uncrossing my legs, twitching my big toe, which is shaking my whole lower body and thus the computer that is sitting on my lap. I am thinking about this post, listening to my dad talk about some online banking thing, and fuming internally over a news story that I just heard on NPR. The Circus Animal cookies that I ate a couple of hours ago have probably hit my stomach by now and my gastrointestinal tract is busily excreting various and sundry enzymes, raising and lowering the amount of hydrochloric acid in my stomach. And of course, my mind is also thinking about what I am going to write next and my fingers are flitting over the keyboard in a relatively complex way that I learned only after having spent hours in keyboarding classes.

And I'm sure that even in trying to account for everything that I do and observe I have only scratched the surface. Human beings, I believe, are the closest thing that we have to perpetual motion machines. From the moment that we're born (and before) to the moment we die (and - I think - after) we are constantly in motion.

Last week I wrote about the collision between people and experiences - how every object, every experience, every thought, every piece of music or art, every tiny thing that our eyes perceive as we amble through life makes an impression on our minds, no matter how small that impression may be. Everything teaches us something, whether or not we realize it. So if we are constantly in motion, our experiences are constantly changing, and if our experiences are constantly changing, we are constantly learning. We may not be making great intellectual leaps and bounds simply by being alive, but we are learning.

Naturally, I believe that an active education takes a great deal more energy than passively learning lessons by virtue of being alive. But the truth is that we have far more energy to learn that we think we do. The majority of the time, we just fail to utilize that energy efficiently.

Yesterday as I was driving around I decided to try a little informal experiment, seeing how well I could absorb information at the mall food court with all the distractions that attend that environment. I bought myself a Philly cheesesteak and sat down to read Dante's Inferno. I picked up where I had left off - in Canto XVII (Canto comes from the Latin cantus meaning "song." It's just one of the sections of a long poem). In this canto, our heroes, Dante and Virgil, are standing at the edge of a cliff that divides two sections of hell from each other, and they watch a beast named Geryon swim (Dante interestingly says "swim" not "fly") up through the filthy air of hell from the bottom of the cliff to meet them where they stand. Geryon symbolizes Fraud, and he is pretty crazy looking: he has a man's face, a half-reptile body, two hairy paws and arms, and a gaudily decorated back and trunk. After Dante wanders off to observe the lot of some usurers, Virgil and Dante hop on Geryon's back and they float down to the bottom of the cliff, doing circles around a waterfall as they go.

Suddenly, right here in the mall, while all of the people around me were eating their cinnabons and their sandwiches, information formed within my brain about this monster named Geryon - I knew what he looked like, what his name was, what he symbolized, how he got from place to place, and what function he played in The Inferno. It took about as much energy to learn this as it would have taken to eat one of those cinnabons - maybe even less.

Now - here's the really neat part - unless you've read Inferno before, you just learned all those same things too! Just sitting here, casually reading this blog. In fact, I kind of tricked you into learning something today - I bet you weren't expecting to pick up a little tidbit about the Inferno, today, did you? But, almost against your will, you did.

I think that many of us consider education a labor. And, I must confess, much of my formal education has been fairly laborious and painful. But does it really have to be? Much as I don't think we can gain a substantial education just by poking around in other people's blogs, I don't think that gaining said substantial education has to be a dolorous process. It should be a labor, sure, but a labor of love. But I think this has a great deal to do with owning one's education, like I talked about in my last post. When we actively learn by choice and not by the caprice of professional educators, it is simple, natural and joyous to do so. The only trouble is, we must make that choice within ourselves. Since I love to run, I think about it like running: I often find myself lazing about in the middle of the day, doing battle within myself, trying to decide whether or not to go on a run. I know that going running will be beneficial to me, it will make me feel good, fit and healthy both during and after the run as well as provide a number of health perks. And yet, one half of me would rather sit on the couch, eating ice cream and watching old episodes of Lost. But, by a titanic act of will, I summon the strength to change into my workout clothes and hit the road.

So must our choice to learn be. It looks difficult from here. It looks like it may be painful. But we know that we will thank ourselves for making that choice. We know we will not only be better off afterward, but that we will enjoy the process, as we are learning those things we have long wished to learn. And so we must, once again, by titanic act of will, summon the strength to change into our thinking caps and hit the books.

So, in short, I think that the question of education is not "Do I have the energy for it?" but "How will I choose to spend the energy that I know I have?" We are more capable than we can conceive of, sitting here on our couches (which takes energy), eating ice cream (which takes energy) and watching Lost (which takes energy). Come on, now. Get up and change. What do you wish to learn? Make the list. What must you do to learn it? Make the list. Got your running shoes on? Good.

Ready, set...