Rabbitholes

How I wish I approached studying earlier:

School should feel like learning, and not like an attempt to try and beat a system.

I don't really feel like my current university experience is conducive to what I think is “true learning”, but I think I’m beginning to break out of this cycle or experiencing this emergence of a new “filter" to properly identify if I'm learning or not. 

So how did I go about “learning” in my first semester of uni?

• Read lecture slides

• Complete homework problems

• Religiously binge the organic chemistry tutor

• Pray to the almighty engineering deities of UWO for a curve 🙏

It was a pretty linear process and I seldomly explored beyond course content, as opposed to probing into emerging curiosities. i.e. connecting course concepts with personal projects just for the fun of it.

Why did this happen?

I believe I focused too much on meeting deadlines and putting too much structure in my schedule. Instead, I should have given myself more freedom to be swept away by rabbitholes.

Why rabbitholes?

I believe rabbitholes are the purest form of curiosity. Simply put, they’re open-ended adventures untethered from ideas such as having “goals” … or just having a destination of sorts. There is a beauty to a rabbithole’s essence; by stripping away a destination of a pursuit, one is no longer left with expectations. In other words the individual no longer is “waiting.”

“Waiting patiently is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the full, and letting the seeds that are sown in the ground on which we stand grow into strong plants”

— Henri J. M. Nouwen in Bread for the Journey

I had hoped for professors and problem sets to satiate my quench for falling in love with the basics and crack open up black boxes, but reality fell short of these expectations. I think I want to learn into this feeling more — probe into this curiosity. I believe its times when we “go-with-the-flow” in a trance-like state that we truly discover our passions.

I don’t want to feel like I’m checking off boxes anymore, but I can’t totally avoid that in university, so I guess I’ll try to keep it at a minimum. I think in my upcoming semester, I want to try playing around with ideas more often – letting images, dance and play in my imagination.

Even if it's at the cost of falling behind in some courses, I know this is the approach I want to take. 

I think I came to this realization this morning.

Upon awakening, I was gripped with a terrible fever. My thoughts seemed shrouded in a haze; I couldn’t control them at all. I felt like I was watching a dream unfold real-time. I would describe it as the inverse of a lucid dream. While i retained full awareness of my visual perceptions and surroundings, I had little to no control of my thoughts. I merely felt like some receiver of information. 

I was trying to amplify this tiny voice to get me out of bed. But eventually I surrendered to this feeling. As I sat in bed, observing my thoughts come in and out without trying to make sense of them, the haziness began to dissipate.

It reminded me of a concept in mindfulness meditation – to become the observer of your own thoughts – but never before had it felt so intensified, without needing to be enabled by a substance. 

I feel like this fever was an eerie reminder for me to look back on what I’ve learned in the past month. To almost “let things” happen to you... to loosen up a bit. Whether that be leaning into a curiosity to probe into ideas, jump into rabbit holes, or even embracing the uncertainty of life when things don't go as planned. 

But I feel like I’m waiting to wake up from this dream. Waiting for life to resume again.

I guess now its all up to figuring out how.