I GREW UP HEARING it as a kind
of promise, as if life would
send me a special guide
the day I became serious
enough - someone wise
who would take the trouble
to show me the way. I
remember waiting, more
than once, for that kind of
cinematic entrance.
What I got instead,
were ordinary days. A
crowded bus, a noisy corridor,
a cluttered desk. No
new teacher, just the same surroundings
I thought I already
understood.
That’s when I stopped waiting and
started looking. The thing that shifted
was a kind of inner focus: suddenly a line
in a book, a gesture in a meeting, or
even a tired rubber band on a stack
of papers began to stand out, as if
the lesson had been hiding in plain
sight and I had finally grown eyes
for it.
REAL LEARNING NEEDS NO
CLASSROOM
We tend to overfocus on
education, especially
collegiate education
as a sort of stepping
stone into the
real world. Somewhere
along the
way, we fool ourselves
that learning
can happen only
in designated settings:
a classroom with a timetable
or an online course with a progress
bar.
Formal learning has its
place; it can open doors
and it signals effort. But
much of the learning
that matters most doesn’t
require such formal settings.
You can see it in a
family that can smell rain
before it falls because generations
have watched the
same horizon. In a friend who
understands group dynamics
without ever having opened a
management book. In a shop assistant
who can tell, from the way someone
enters, whether they are here to browse
or buy. These are also forms of study, built
out of planned repetition and rapt attention,
and they rarely show up on a résumé.
WHEN OBJECTS START TO SPEAK
You must start to see learning as something
that pervades everything. A cracked
phone screen, a long queue, a traffic signal
that refuses to turn green – all of them begin
to hold up small mirrors. They show
you how you react, where you tense up,
what you ignore, what you return to again
and again.
A rubber band spends its life in that unnoticed
category. It lies in drawers, snaps
against fingers, circles stacks of paper,
keeps lunch boxes shut. It stretches to
make room, then shrinks back to shape.
It holds together what would otherwise
fall apart. And if you watch it closely for a
while – how it reacts to stress, how it eventually gives up and breaks – you
start to see a familiar pattern of
your own: how far you can bend,
how long you can hold, and what
it costs when you pretend there
are no limits.
A rubber band
spends its life in
that unnoticed
category. It
stretches to
make room, then
shrinks back to
shape.
There is a reason the rubber
band rarely appears in graduation
speeches. It is too plain. Yet,
day after day, it performs useful
labour: holding loose pages
together, keeping food from
spilling, absorbing sudden pulls
without protest. It knows, in its
own way, that its job is not to
be celebrated but to survive the
next stretch. Watching it, I start
to wonder which parts of my own
life I treat like this – what I keep
holding together quietly, and at
what point the material begins
to fray.
If you want to play with this
as a way of learning, you might
start very simply: Choose one
everyday object that has been
working for you in the background,
observe it over a day, and
note where its limits show up.
You do not have to turn this
into a project or a post. It can
remain a private habit, a small
agreement between you and the
things that share your day. The
only real shift is this: instead of
waiting for a grand teacher to arrive,
you let the world begin to
answer back, one rubber band at
a time.
By the way, everybody knows
that too much stress breaks the
rubber band. But, did you know
that an unstressed rubber band,
left unstretched for too long loses
its elasticity? Google or ChatGPT
can tell you the scientific reason
why, but to me, I recall the
word “eustress”. It is the opposite
of distress. Positive stress
characterised by excitement,
motivation, and fulfilment that
leads to beneficial outcomes. Are
you eustressing enough?!