Youth and the joy of learning

I’m in Seoul, South Korea right now, conducting a two-week debate training seminar for high school and college kids.  I’ve just completed the first week, with the high school kids, and I must say that their enthusiasm and eagerness to learn is really refreshing.  It made me want to go back to school and learn new thing all over again. 🙂

It made me wonder, though.  At the age of 32, have I lost the will to learn new things?  Part of my "existential crisis" mentioned earlier had to do with not knowing what to do with my life.  Is this more a symptom of boredom and intellectual stagnation than anything else?

I just realized, this past week, that having new intellectual challenges is crucial to a fulfilling life, at least for me.  I can’t stand just sitting around doing the same old thing over and over again.  That’s why I’ve always liked teaching.  The material may stay the same, but the students never will, and somehow you always get new challenges each teaching term.  Seeing the faces of the young Korean high school students, and seeing how excited they all got learning about debating and public speaking, made me feel a bit wistful. 

I long for the days when my life was an unpainted canvas… when I still had all my choices to make.  I’m not naive enough to want to do my life over, of course.  I know that who and what I am is a direct consequence of all the decisions I consciously made… but there’s still a part of me that longs for a chance at a new life, however impractical that might be.  I look back at the person I used to be, at the same age as these high school kids I’ve just finished helping, and I wish I had half as much wisdom as I have now.  It would have saved me a lot of heartache, that’s for sure.

But this is the life I have made for myself, and I won’t sit up at night crying over it.  I will just strive to take each new challenge with as much fire and enthusiasm as I saw in the faces of the kids this week.  After all, if all I do is learn something new about myself and about life, then surely I’m getting somewhere, right? 🙂