Life Is Our School: How Are We Taking The Curriculum?

LIFE is our school. And the lessons we learn from it are unique to each of us because both our outer circumstances and our inner reflections affect how we take in the curriculum. The extent of what we learn is directly related to what we spend our time doing and thinking about.  These are the foods of impressions that we take in through our senses and become a part of who we are.  So how are we taking life’s curriculum these days? Are we resisting or accepting it? Are we exploring new interests and adventures or retreating into the comfort and security of habits?  Either way, it takes courage to move through life’s challenges. 

LIFE is our school and learning transforms us. But how much are the external things in the world transforming us and how much are we transforming the world we experience? You may ask how can we transform the world around us? Well, we do it every day by the things we think about.  Everything we watch, listen to, read, and spend time thinking about dramatically affects our perspectives of the lessons we receive from the world around us.

This week’s quote is from Helen Keller. “Knowledge is love and light and vision.”

Helen Keller was without light and vision since the age of 18 months, yet she was able to become enlightened and experience the light of the world through education.  How difficult it must have been to learn given her physical limitations. How frustrating and even fearful it must have been for her to move through her daily life without being able to see or hear what was happening in the world around her. Not just the physical attributes but the meanings behind every occurrence. She was faced with what most people would label as enormous adversity. As a child, in response to her frustration, she would throw tantrums, and many family and community members encouraged her parents to put her in an institution because they felt she would be a constant burden and would never be able to learn. Fortunately for Helen, instead her parents searched for and found an incredibly patient teacher that devoted her life to providing mechanisms and signs for Helen to develop understanding and to learn how to learn. Knowledge began to shed light and vision upon her mind and she developed a deep love for the challenges.  

In her autobiography, she writes about how her teacher would spell words with her fingers into Helen’s hand and that she really did not know that those movements were words or that even words existed; she just copied the motions… but then: 

Keller’s breakthrough in communication came the next month when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of “water”. 

She recalls that AHA moment:  “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!”

This awakening set her free. She was able to grow through her outer challenges because she had an inner awakening.  She appreciated the art of learning and understood what it meant for her ability to live freely. She became the first person with deaf-blindness to graduate from college (Radcliffe); she was great friends with Mark Twain who was inspired by her wit and sense of humor, and later became a co-founder of the ACLU and transformed the way society judged individual human potential. 

“Knowledge is love and light and vision.” We can love or appreciate something only after we have some understanding of its meaning in relation to ourselves. We can be enlightened only through deep knowledge and understanding of our experiences in relation to others. And our ability to see clearly the world around us doesn’t necessarily come from our eyesight but from our soul’s ability to share and communicate common thoughts. 

LIFE is our interactive school.  Helen Keller is a powerful reminder that learning does transform us and that our joy is directly dependent upon our reflective reactions to LIFE’s curriculum.
Happy Learning!