The Art Of Unlearning

Starting Off on the Right Foot

In many ways, the course of our lives could be considered to be a long journey of sorts from start to finish. We often tend to break our ‘journey of life’ down into a number of different discrete stages, usually losing sight of its entire scope by having done so though. This is because many of these stages become considered to be something entirely separate from the other stages, and so, within our perception at least, we begin to see all of these stages as being something separate from each other. Some examples of these stages are the baby stage, the infant stage, childhood, our teenage years, adulthood, and old age. These are some of the key stages that we typically imagine that our life can be split up into; these stages making up each of our life’s journeys.

It is important to note that each stage within this larger journey is a journey in its own right and yet, at the same time, it must also exists as a part of the larger total journey. The same principle can be observed to be an active component in the phenomenon of a book. We can identify this easily by looking at the fact that the vast majority of books are broken down by their authors into distinct chapters. Each chapter within that book is a self-contained unit, even though it must also exist as a constituent part of the whole book at the same time. Once we have understood how this principle relates to a book and its chapters, we can then observe the same principle operating in our own lives because the same principle is also an active part of it, only often not being something that we are consciously aware of at all times.

We can then take that idea of chapters in a book and try to imagine for a moment what it would be like if we broke our lives down into a number of distinct chapters, as if the story of our life had been written in a book. An example of a ‘chapter’ within this ‘book of our life’ could be the journey that we embark on to resolve some health issue we find ourselves faced with, even though, within a different context, such a set of events could also be represented by an entire book, itself being split into chapters which would each contain a specific part of that journey within it. 

We could imagine that each particular chapter in the less expanded scope of that much smaller book would contain within it certain stages of the process by which we eventually come to resolve said health issue. These chapters could for example be us actually discovering the health issue, the process whereby we try to resolve that health issue by becoming engaged in a search for its cure, the eventual resolution of that health issue, and perhaps even a chapter covering our good health once we have completely resolved the issue.

We can also take a moment now to ponder upon a number of different chapters that we would typically find cropping up in the much wider scope of the ‘story of our lives’, generally speaking those experiences which most human beings go through as a simple biproduct of them being a human being existing in the world today. These would be related to the common experiences that most of us pass through as a natural part of the unfoldment of our lives. These types of experiences, for most, are things such as our schooling and education, our romantic partnerships, the setting up of a business or the beginning of our careers, as well as the establishment of our home.