Learning: It's not as hard as you think, if you put your mind to it

Don't blame Democrats, blame the genie

Donald Trump and I are practically the same age.

He is 26,396 days old.

I’m 26,266 days old.

I express our ages in days rather than years because the subject of this essay is learning, and I believe learning is an on-going, day-in, day-out experience. Yeah, we might have graduated in such and such year, or our twenties—pick your own decade –may have been throwaway years, but learning is a never ending process. At least, it should be.

While Trump is about four months older than me—a hundred and thirty days to be exact, I strongly believe he has wasted some of them, maybe more than he would likely admit to.

For almost every day that I have lived, I strongly believe I have learned something. I’m not saying I always put that knowledge to good use, or that I didn’t at some point forget what I’d learned, only to have to learn it again. To be sure, there were days when I didn’t learn a damn thing, and for that, I have no one to blame but myself. Nevertheless, I try to keep an open mind.

In my opinion, based on observations I have made over the last 15,000 days or so, Donald Trump hasn’t learned a damn thing on most of the 26,000 days he’s spent trying to impress on us, how much he knows.

What does it matter?  

I don’t know.

I just finished writing a novel about Trump that might not sell 100 copies if it were to stay in print for the next—let’s just keep it simple and say 10,000 days. Meanwhile, he is president of the United States.

That should tell anyone all they need to know about the greatest nation on earth and what it takes to succeed in it.

Nevertheless, this is an essay about learning and how every day is important. It’s certainly not about fairness or irony or luck.

At a very tender age, I learned that if I brought to an adult, a soon-to-be orphaned bird that fell out of a nest in a tall plum tree, I’d be the recipient of an abundance of praise. Later, I learned that if they discover I knocked the bird nest out of the tree, I would get punished.

Lesson: don’t lie; and don’t knock bird nests out of trees.

I was a little older, but remember specifically the day I learned that macadam was another word for pavement. I was reading The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac sometime around fifth grade when I came across the word. There was no way I was going to infer its meaning, so I looked it up. Once I did that, as the saying goes, that word belonged to me.

I was much older, and had kids about the same age as I was when I made these discoveries, when I learned something else that has stuck with me—both the lesson itself and the exact time that I learned it.

We were visiting my wife’s mother, who was dying, and I was trimming the shrubs in her front yard because that was one of the few things, she could still control. I was attacking them as if I was in some kind of martial arts competition, when she advised me to start low with the shredder and only move in an upward direction. This would take out all the tiny outside branches and leave the inside ones. The bush would grow thicker and trimming would be needed less frequently.

More recently, I learned that aria is an operatic solo. A lot of people may already know this, but I didn’t. I discovered this when doing a crossword puzzle, which I never did until about five or six years ago.

I would say that crossword puzzles have turned into one of my greatest learning resources.

I’m not afraid to admit, there is much I don’t know. I don’t understand the intricacies of growing grass as well as I should, by this stage in my life. I know the theory of electricity, but not the practical appliance of it. I’m reminded of this every time, for an $89 service fee, a repairman uses a simple gauge to determine I need a new capacitor, whatever the hell that is. I understand stocks, but don’t have a clue about bonds.

Obviously, being around a lot of days isn’t as important to learning as what you do on those days.

As mentioned earlier, Trump and I have been around for approximately the same number of days—a lot. I don’t think he knows anything. I could be wrong. This might be another case of something I don’t know, or something I think I know, but really don’t, but after observing him for more days than I’d like to admit to, I simply don’t think he knows much.

Why have I learned so much, even taking into account all that I still don’t know, when in my opinion, he has learned so little? 

The key might just be a willingness or lack thereof to own up to what we don’t know.

I watched Trump point to his head on numerous occasions and talk about his great thinking capacity. I’ve heard him exclaim that only he can fix things; inferring that many of the problems facing mankind are simply beyond the scope of what lesser mortals than he can accomplish. Obviously, when it comes to the accumulation of knowledge, he feels as though he’s peaked.

This is what I know. A vacuums is the absence of air. I learned this in Physics courses. I learned the practical application of the theory as a vacuum cleaner salesman over forty years ago. A vacuum doesn’t have to remain a vacuum. In fact, filling that vacuum can prove very beneficial and it isn’t that difficult.

When Trump sees what he considers an “empty barrel,” his first instinct is to ridicule it. Trump almost never meets someone that he doesn’t think is an empty barrel and inferior to him. He certainly doesn’t think there is anything left for him to learn.

Knowing you don’t know everything might be the first step to actually learning something.

Thinking you know everything might be the biggest hindrance to learning anything.

I know enough to know the risk I run with this last statement.

I also know something about momentum. Trump isn’t getting those 26,396 days he’s lost back, and when you have that many days behind you, pushing you in one direction, the odds of changing direction are practically zero.