Friday, October 15, 2010

The Learning Curve

A little girl leaning against a sofa.
A little girl leaning against a sofa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There isn’t a single thing we do in life that we do not learn by imitation. The basic tool of learning and one of its most efficient is imitation.

From our first steps as toddlers, as we attempted and failed in the quest to stroll on the soles of our feet-and not our palms and kneecaps scrubbing the length of the floor-to the earliest moments we began sprinting with a measure of gait in our bounce, we are products of imitation. We imitated our parents, a brother, a sister, a classmate, our teacher, or a close neighbor. And there is an infinitely interesting fact about this thing: the learning curve is one hard knock college nobody ever graduates from.

We thrive from our experiences and as we know better, we do better. But, we never actually stop learning. We become mature in decision-making; we understand the weight of our choices, yes, much more than we did as toddlers; we become men in handling our own affairs. Mama doesn’t have to watch out for us anymore and make sure we do not fall in the pot of soup or tumble down the staircase while trying to play Superman like the kid in the old Nigerian children short story, ‘Ade our Naughty Lil’ Brother’.

If any man actually graduates from this institution, he has no right to teach. The man who stops learning, stops growing and ultimately stops living. If you are trying to give what you don’t possess, now that’s a bigger gamble than a pack of dice and God help your pupil.

Life presents to us, numerous privileges, each of these enrich us in a special way. The moments of life are brimming with resources; heaven’s providence sent to haul us through the corridors of improvement. We pile up nuggets of useful information when we open our hearts and embrace life with a little bit of sincerity and a truckload of simplicity.

The law of imitation, not the tendency to fake it. The simple creed of learning from another can happen to us through anybody. (And really, it never stops happening.) They do not have to be older or more educated in such matters than we are. We continue by bonding our hearts and spirits through the principle of sharing. And the reality stands undisputed we can never chance the stages of self-discovery unless we imitate in the minutest of things.


Keep your pen bleeding!




Akpan
Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments:

Post a Comment

Feedbacks welcome and appreciated.

Free counters!