Unexceptionally Exceptional: A Gateway to Learning

This is the third and final installment of Unexceptionally Exceptional, which is the text from the talk I presented at the Northeast Unschooling Conference at the end of August. You might want to read part one and part two first: The Meaning of Success, and Time for Struggle, Time for Joy.

Downtime of all sorts can be valuable, and one of the way that manifests is in boredom.

I decided that me and my sister should sing a duet for the talent show because I was bored. I’ve been bored a lot in the past year, mainly because when things aren’t going great, I’m less likely to have a good routine going with regular activities, and more likely to feel restlessness.

So, in some ways the boredom I’ve felt has been a sign of things not going as well as they could be. But in other ways, boredom has always been a force of creativity in my life. As I wrote in a post on the Home School Life Magazine blog back in February:

“Boredom acts as a gateway, as the beginning of something new or different, or the introduction (or reintroduction) to a new hobby or passion, something that will go on to be an important part of our days. 

Or not. As important as the productivity that boredom can lead to, equally important is simply the space of boredom itself. The time for us to get past the initial restlessness or discomfort of not being busy, not doing, and settle into reflection, observation, stillness. We need the time to process and digest our learning, our experiences, and sometimes boredom can be a part of that.”

To struggle, to be bored, is part of the process of learning, and of healing.

I’ve never sung a duet in public before. I sung in a church choir and a homeschool choir when I was young, but my voice, when others are listening to me perform, has always been part of a crowd: a hopefully harmonious small part of the whole. I’ve sung in small groups, casually, where everyone is messing up and messing around, playing instruments they’re less familiar with and maybe trying out a new harmony. It hasn’t felt like much pressure.

But what I was suggesting to my sister when I turned to her and said “we should do a duet at NEUC” was scary. Everyone would be listening to my voice. They’d hear if I messed up.

But, I was bored that evening, and I wanted to sing with my sister, and once the thought crossed my mind and the words left my mouth, I became determined to follow through with it.

We sung Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars.

Sometimes, too, boredom is the impetus to actually work through emotional shit. Keeping busy, always talking and working and doing, can be a way to hide from difficult emotions, to avoid facing difficult experiences. Boredom, an absence of busy-ness, has forced me to process what’s been happening in my life, to reflect, accept, and work towards moving forward.

And as I move forward, I find myself asking again and again, what is success? It’s layered and multi-faceted, and my definition is constantly changing. I’m working on being at peace with my life, with where I am right now.

I’m learning to move forward. I may still be grieving the loss of two cats who meant the world to me, yet I have two different cats who have now come to mean an incredible amount to me as well. I’m still not living the dream life, there are still so many things I might want to change. Yet the garden still grows, and my family still loves me.

My darling Bea, of the no-tail and too-many-toes.

Success isn’t something you can attain in one grand swoop. I’m reminded of an Allie Brosh comic, where the author in scratchy comic form is shown gesturing sweepingly towards a purple ribbon wrapped trophy on the mantlepiece. “That right there is my ability to be responsible” she says. “I won it when I was 25.”

People my age, whether unschooled or not, have so many flawed and conflicting beliefs about what it means to be a successful adult, and how that can achieved. I guess we’re all floundering, at least some of the time, and just trying to figure out what we’re doing.

Unschooling, too, is a practice of learning and un-learning and re-learning, trying to find a path to respectful relationships, a peaceful home, and joyful learning.

Ah, the joy. Because the thing is, no matter how hard some times in our lives might be, no matter that our lives might not always look how we think they’re supposed to, there’s so much joy.

Pursuing an unschooling life is pursuing joy. It’s cultivating the excitement of discovery; the satisfaction of doing hard things on your own initiative; the companionship of strong relationships and time spent with people you not only love, but like.

Me and my mommy.

I spend as much time as I do talking and writing about unschooling because, despite none of this being new to me, it still fills me with so much excitement. My mind spirals into thoughts of what I’ve learned, with great pleasure, to do: bake pies and ferment kombucha and grow zucchinis. I think of all there is that I’m going to get to learn in the future. I think about how learning feels: the playful, relaxed, yet deeply focused intent of doing something I truly love, something that hits the perfect sweet spot of challenging yet attainable. It feels like freedom. And it’s one of the best feelings there is.

How can I not consider that joy, in and of itself, a form of success? I delight in learning, and in sharing, and in making the tenets of unschooling a continuing part of my adult life.

This past year may have tested me in a hundred different ways, but I’m proud that I managed, through everything, to find those joyful moments.

It takes a shift in focus to start seeing the success in your own life. It’s hard. Do I ever know how hard it is! I struggle every day to truly value my unique education, to recognize how much I’ve done and am doing in my life. To really feel my success.

But whenever I force myself to stop and really look, I can see it. I see the learning, and the growth, and the joy, and I know that I’ll be okay. I’ve got this. I’m busy building the life I want one messy, difficult, enthusiastic piece at a time.

The Role of Boredom and Dabbling in Pursuit of Passionate Learning

One of the greatest benefits of unschooling, it's frequently said, is that it gives children the time and encouragement to truly find and embrace their passions. I agree with this, for sure, yet I've noticed that many people new to unschooling or self directed learning, whether they're parents or young adults newly risen out of college, panic when they don't see a passion immediately manifesting itself in their life or the lives of their children. We're supposed to be driven by passion and digging deep into real learning, they think, so what's with all this boredom and flitting from one thing to another?

I'd say that both of those things, instead of being signs of failure, are just part of the process.

Deschooling

"For me, it was probably about a year before I felt like we were truly unschooling, not deschooling. There was no announcement, no graduation ceremony, but one day I realized I no longer felt like I was emulating the lifestyle—we were living it. I was no longer trying to wrap my mind around the principles, instead I was spending my time supporting how those principles were playing out in my unique family." Pam Laricchia, Why Deschooling?

If you're new to life learning, I think the first thing to realize is that it's going to take time. Time to adjust, to move past school ideas about what learning looks like, time to figure out how your new learning path is going to work in your own life. I feel like people tend to rush things, or feel like the change is going to be immediate, when in reality we're all taking things step by step, no matter where we are in our life learning journey. As I regularly tell myself in a variety of circumstances, slow down, breathe, and try not to panic if things don't look the way you'd imagined right off!

Boredom

"What if, I wondered, as I enjoyed the sights and smells of the early morning, more people paid attention to the journey of life, not just the destination? What if they paid more attention to their experiences moment by moment? I suspect they would find that boredom is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, a filter through which emotions, experiences and, yes, solitude can pass, resulting in a soaring of creativity and imagination." Wendy Priesnitz, The Benefits of Boredom

"Out of boredom, interests spring like mushrooms in moist soil. In the autonomous zone we have created, students have the time and support to explore each of these interests as fully as they choose. If that interest pays dividends, if it engages the student in a compelling way, sufficiently meeting her intellectual, emotional, kinesthetic, or other needs, she will stay with it, dig deeper, until she achieves what feels like mastery to her. Then she can apply those lessons of perseverance, effort, and excellence to any other topic, well into adulthood. If it does not meet these needs, if its hooks do not catch, she will let it go and return to the difficult but rich soil of boredom, until the next mushroom appears." Michelle Loucas, Bored? Explore It!

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury

Before I sat down to write this post, I frustrated my sister by chattering, singing deliberately off-key, being melodramatic about everything, begging her to let me have coffee, and otherwise being difficult. In short, I was bored, and showing it by being very exuberantly annoying. Complaining is part of my writing process, I recently said on Facebook, and while I wrote it with a smile, I believe it to be true, because boredom is part of my writing process. It's in the restlessness and frustration of a mind that has nothing else interesting to focus on that a post starts to take shape. It's while I'm lying awake in bed, unable to sleep (which must be the ultimate in boredom), that I start to build a narrative for an article I've wanted to write for ages, or start putting together a menu full of interesting new dishes to experiment with.

Without boredom, I wouldn't be able to create, to be creative. I'd say that's true of most if not all of us.

Not only does boredom lead to creativity in the areas we're already proficient in, but it also leads to new discoveries. Whether you're new to unschooling or not, I think boredom is just a part of life, and while boredom that becomes a continuous and ongoing companion might definitely be an indicator that changes that need to be made, in general, boredom is just the space that allows us to discover new things we wouldn't otherwise discover. It's boredom that leads me to pick up a guitar for the first time in many months and try to learn a new song, or read about a new subject online.

Boredom is an essential element in both creativity and discovery, and should be recognized as the restless stage that proceeds a new project, passion, or breakthrough.

Dabbling

"This is not to say that, when the student finally decides to engage in an activity, it will always be immensely satisfying or long lasting. She may flit from activity to activity for quite some time. She may embrace art for weeks, with devotion and drive, only to drop it unceremoniously one day and lapse back into a painful bout of boredom. Or, she might trade in art for kick boxing, a passion that she adopts fiercely and exclusively for a day or a month, only to abandon it as well." Michelle Loucas, Bored? Explore It!

"It might appear that some children are more prone to 'quitting things' and less able to 'commit' to activities and stick with them – but what if you flip that around and view those children as dabblers, experimenters – open to the world and curious about everything? Those are the children who, if their trust is not eroded by parental control, will try anything once (or more than once). And yes, they will quit more things than those children who dive deep and stick around longer with one activity. But that’s due to the sheer volume of things they try! If you have a child who decides she wants to put everything she has into martial arts and music, and then decides later that she actually prefers martial arts and is tired of music for now, she has a fifty percent quit rate. If you have a child who tries sixteen different things in one year, and ends up liking four of them a lot, that child might have a seventy-five percent quit rate, but he now has four activities he loves, not just one." Lyla Wolffenstein, Dabbling, Digging Deep, and Quitting: The Real Costs of Parental Pressure

 I've gotten more than one message from a parent concerned that their child can't settle on anything, each day drawn to a new interest or subject, forever flitting from one thing to another. As the above quotes point out, this "dabbling" is likely either due to the personality of the individual, or is simply part of the process of finding a passion.

One of the things I've always appreciated about unschooling is that I never had to spend more time than I wanted on any specific subject or interest. There were hundreds--thousands--of questions answered by Google or a quick look at a book from our home or community library. Just because something is interesting, doesn't mean that interest has to last longer than it takes to find the answer to a question, and if it doesn't end there, it may take just an hour or a day's exploration to feel satisfied. Because really, that's what you're looking for: satisfaction, or the discovery that something really isn't for you, which is a satisfying sense of closure in itself.

The way you decide if you want to do something is by trying it. And if you look around and feel yourself excited by the vast plethora of options available to you, then you're probably going to try a whole lot of things. Most of them won't stick, won't be as interesting as you thought or will take up more time than you're prepared to commit, or perhaps just won't feel quite right.

That desire to explore, try new things, and take risks is a very childlike attitude, and one that shows strong curiosity and a joy in learning and discovery that too many people lose as they grow into teenage and adult years. Instead of seeing dabbling as a failure to stick with things, it should be valued, and those who practice it should be recognized as the curious individuals they are.

Dabbling, the same as boredom, is an integral part of exploration. For some, this dabbling style of learning will remain lifelong, and for others it will simply be what happens in between periods of more intense focus on a specific activity or topic. Either way, exploring a wider range of topics and activities is certainly a positive thing.

Play

"For a small child, there is no division between playing and learning, between the things he or she does 'just for fun' and things that are 'educational.' The child learns while living and any part of living that is enjoyable is also play." Penelope Leach

"When we treat children’s play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that’s to be found in the creative spirit. It’s the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives." Fred Rogers

"The central problem is that we undervalue pleasure. We live in a culture that is consumed with the Protestant work ethic. Work as work, not work as play, is a powerful pressure against play. In that ethos, pleasure for itself is frivolous. So play is not widely seen as a value in itself for adults. I have learned, to the contrary, that play is, in short, excellent for my health — for brain, mind, and emotions, all of which promote well-being in my life, economically, emotionally, and spiritually. For health, everyone should choose and pursue activities that are playful and truly pleasurable." Bernard De Koven, Reshaping The Brain Through Play

This guy brings a lot of playfulness into my life.

Dabbling in learning, that free flowing exploration without a strict timetable or set goals or an authority figure looking over our shoulders, is learning that's playful. Increasingly, play is being recognized for the important role it plays in learning and health, for children especially but also for adults. I recognize that playful, free flowing feeling when I'm reading a funny piece of history aloud to my sister while we both laugh, or when I'm so deeply immersed in a cooking project, simultaneously focused and relaxed, a bright joyfulness burning in me while I fiddle and create. I feel it when I'm playing with my oversize shaggy puppy, both of us focused intently on each others' body language and vocalizations, completely engaged in communicating and playing together.

All of these activities feel deeply engaging for my brain, as well as being undeniably fun. Yet despite the growing recognition that play isn't just helpful, but an essential part of growing and learning for countless species, humans included, it's still often not seen as "real" learning. Educational things are supposed to look like work, not play, and too few people realize that you can be engaged in both at once.

Passionate Learning

“We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to us, because it’s natural, and because it’s impossible to live in the world and not learn." Peggy Pirro

When my sister Emilie was young, she was fascinated by Egyptian mythology. Sparked by a love of Yu-Gi-Oh, which takes inspiration from that mythology, Emilie spent lots of time reading about and researching the subject. She'd talk about how different gods changed over time and by region, she made a presentation for a homeschool expo, and when touring the Smithsonian Museum of History in Washington DC, she indignantly pointed out that one of the items in the Egyptian exhibit was mis-labelled. A middle-aged man, acting as a tour guide for his companions, and talking about the exhibits in Cairo that he'd seen previously, looked down at this small child in shock, and said "you're right."

Finding passions to focus deeply on will be an integral part of unschooling for almost all of us. I do think it's an immensely positive and important part of learning for people, at least sometimes and with some things. However, I'd stress that I think that it's an important part of learning, not the be all and end all of unschooling. We need to recognize the important roles of boredom and dabbling, of free play and exploration. Some things will turn into passions that stay with us for years, but many other interests will be dropped after the briefest of perusing. Countless hours will be spent in exploration, yet that exploration will likely be precipitated by boredom. It's all learning, it's all part of the process, and it's all important.

When we embrace learning as a lifestyle, and as a lifelong passionate pursuit, we learn to value the whole package, boredom and all. We learn that the restlessness comes with rewards, that no time spent in exploring is ever wasted, that idleness breeds creativity, and that play is essential. I'm still re-learning these things over and over again, despite how little schooling I've had in my life, and I'm being reminded daily of how important it is to take my own advice on learning to heart. But what I'm striving for, always, is to live a life filled with joyful learning, with all its inherent struggles and rewards.

I hope you'll join me in this passionate pursuit.