Unlearning to Learn.

Hello readers! I just turned 20 last week and I feel great! It feels great to be 20. Well yeah, it also feels good to be a teenager. It’s just sad to say that I am no longer a “teenager” as what my age dictates, but I am pretty sure that I still look  like one. I spent my birthday with few of my closest friends; they are actually my high school friends which I have created a strong bond with. I treat them out to somewhere and ate some pizza. It’s actually my first time to treat my friends out in my birthday while spending my own money! Oh yeah, I’m not really the kind of person who treats their friends in their birthdays. Maybe spending money is just not my thing or something. But yeah! I deviate in my birthday and spent some money. Well I guess it’s not bad to spend money for happiness. I think it’s quite fun, especially that I am with the people whom I love most. They are not the best people in the world but they are the ones who love me and would never judge me. I was touched by the people who heartedly greeted me because only few people remembered it since I did not put my birth date public in facebook. 

One of my best friends gave a sweet gift, a balloon, a sweet marshmallow and a thing that has “you are special” on it and I was really touched. In addition, my birthday was extra special because something happened just a day before that. I realized a lot of things because a friend of mine shared something about God and I was enlightened by his love. You know, I was fed by his spiritual love and it feels different. I felt light and happy in my birthday.

My birthday realizations...

There are a lot of realizations that I made in my 20 years of existence. You know some deep thoughts about anything in and out of this world. I learned the other week that in order to learn, you must learn to unlearn things. Unlearning to Learn. That is the idea! It may sound silly but it’s really witty. As we can see, our lives become a routine. We go to school, eat our lunch, go to classes then go home. It’s a cycle and we do it because we need it. We need to pass or we need to have a salary. In that way, life becomes monotonous. It becomes uninteresting and boring, which is very different from a child’s point of view of the world. Children are always amazed by everything. They are amazed by how the sky is blue, why the dogs bark, why the trees are green and so on. They are amazed by the simple things in life like how the birds fly. Those things are silly in an adult’s mind.

In a point of view of an alien, our world is interesting simply because it’s different from their own perspective. In that way, they will learn a lot just by observing and gain new knowledge and a new perspective from the environment. That is how we are supposed to look at our world. We need to defamiliarize. If we defamiliarize ourselves that the sky is blue, then we will see a new picture, a new perspective. We way we see our world is different from the way an alien sees it. We become unbiased with our thoughts and become open for new ideas. In this way, you’ll learn how to appreciate life and understand life more. It is something that is needed to be developed but it is often the most neglected.

A sad reality in these days is that the essential things are often forgotten because people tend to focus more on their wants, rather than their needs. People tend to be shallow when we talk about life. They have forgotten the art of life and how it goes.