Learnings

the REST of the week #169

It’s the rest of the week. Shall we swap out lessons for learnings?

Accidental art in an apartment remodel (Sabtieh, Lebanon). You never know when paying attention might turn your world into a momentary gallery.

A person could spend their whole life learning their lesson—paying attention to performance and progress in a striving to reach…

To reach what?

The shiny mirage of some future place of arrival where we are happy, put together, in control?

It would be a pity to get to the end of our lives before we realize that no one ever really arrives at such a place—to realize that in our strivings we missed out on actually putting down our weight in the here and now and living our life—discovering and learning along the way.

But we know better. So we keep thinking about what it means to rest right where we are. To take note of what it means to attend to the messy moment of right now.

And without the burden of learning our lesson and making sure we get it right next time, we free up all kinds of space and energy to discover who we are, who God is, and what we want to do with our lives.

We learn.

Everything is easier when you want to do what you’re doing. Not that you feel like it or that it comes easily, but you are a free moral agent (as my mother used to say) and get to choose.

We have agency. We can adapt and grow and thrive in life.

Our relationship to God becomes more personal and less transactional.

Last week I mentioned the TED talk about polyglots and the characteristics of people who, in spite of not being “naturally gifted”, learn to speak several languages. You can check it out here.

There are four points, but what stands out the most to me is that the polyglots wanted to learn another language and they took charge of their learning—they found things that worked for them and stayed engaged in the process.

Enjoyment eclipsed frustration.

This is what I am learning with my Arabic studies.

Thanks so much for your thoughts and prayers. Ricardo and I passed our (very difficult) final exam and are excited to begin phase two of our studies which will go at a more reasonable pace and focus on getting all the wonderful knowledge in our heads out of our mouths and more recognizable to our ears.

Over the course of the past 5 weeks there have been countless opportunities to regroup and choose rest.

Rest from comparison.

Rest from expectations.

Rest from thinking that if I’ve heard something once, I should automatically remember it.

Rest from frustration.

Rest from discouragement.

Rest when my body said rest.

Rest when I recognized that the process was taking on a life of itself and becoming all consuming.

Rest when I realized there was no way to master everything we’d been exposed to.

Rest and regrouping when it felt impossible.

Here’s to learnings and resting in the process.

May your rest be sweet.

Alicia