One of the primary purposes of this adventure for me is to learn new things.  I’ve found that I’ve become a bit stagnant in my learning.  As a child, learning came easy – I showed up in class and got straight A’s.  That pretty much happened all the way through high school.  When I showed up at Colorado State University, one of the first things I learned is that didn’t know as much as I thought I knew.  Turns out that I must have learned a fair amount through observation and memorization because I was shocked when I got my first “D”.  OMG!  I’m going to have to study.  So I started observing and memorizing again.  With a bit of persistence and begging others to show me how to do things, I managed to graduate college with a decent GPA and soon started my career.

After more than 25 years of doing what I did well and even teaching a few others how to do things I knew how to do, I’m re-discovering what it is like to learn and finding out that I never really learned how to learn.

I’m now in a tiny rural village in Ecuador and don’t know how to speak Spanish.  I’ve memorized a bunch of words but don’t know how to use them in conversation so I thought I’d simply find a teacher.  Turns out there are formal Spanish schools all over Ecuador but none in the city I have chosen to stay in for about a month so I thought I’d simply enroll in an online course – seemed easy but, unfortunately internet connectivity in Crucita (if even available) is extremely slow and unreliable so I’m finding that I have to teach myself.  Needless to say – it’s harder to learn something new than I expected.

In addition to my desire to learn how to communicate effectively in Spanish, I’m also still learning how to paraglide and developing my own website/blog for the first time.  As a techno-idiot, even this is proving to be a challenge.  Needless to say, I’m developing a whole new appreciation for the challenges of learning and, as an added benefit (which seems like a curse), having to learn a bit more about patience as well!

“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”

                -Albert Einstein