The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

I moved to Chicago when I was 19 to attend college. I spent the next several years living in the suburbs, going to school, and working various jobs. One of the necessities for my college survival was the purchase of a car. I didn’t know anything about cars and had little money to speak of, which is why I bought a $250 1977 Lincoln Continental. I didn’t know it was a bad deal until it broke down the first time, about 20 minutes after I paid for it. After finally getting it back to the dorm where I was living, I caught a ride to the parts store where I picked up a repair manual and basic tool set. I spent the next several months reading that manual and tinkering with my $250 lemon. By the end of the school year, I was competent enough to make a decent income repairing cars for fellow students. I went from not knowing that my Continental had a V-8 to fixing other peoples cars for cash. All I did to make that happen was read a repair manual over and over until I understood how cars worked and the basics of repairing them.

We live in a pretty amazing time in history. A few hundred years ago, you had to apprentice to another person that trained you in a skill. That was really the norm for the thousands of years of recorded history. Knowledge and skills were difficult to acquire. That’s quite a distance from my automotive repair self education. 25 years ago, it was possible to learn almost anything by picking up books on the subject. Today, you don’t even really need to buy a book. YouTube, websites, free online courses, and all manner of other resources are accessible from a device most people carry in their pockets. The most dramatic revolution of our era is in the glut of free information and training we all have at our fingertips. You can learn anything you want if you’re willing to invest the time and energy. The collected knowledge of man is at our fingertips all the time.

The potential growth of every and any person is limited only by their ability and willingness to learn. The crazy thing is that we don’t often stop and see the value of it. I will confess that it is easier to do nothing than to learn to cook or paint or basic carpentry or any of the million other skills. Knowledge, which was once a precious and rare commodity, is now so abundant that it looks worthless. It sort of reminds me of when I moved to the DC suburbs. Many folks I knew had never been to any of the Smithsonian museums or monuments in the capital. As soon as I learned to drive, I went to the city regularly to check out everything there was to see.

For us today, it’s easy to allow the availability of knowledge to be so common that we don’t notice it anymore. We can easily lose the curiosity and interest needed to grow as people. The real key to recapturing our curiosity is to pay attention to the world around us and ask a lot of questions. When my kids were younger, the question “why?” drove me nuts. Eventually, I learned that it’s a great question and the answer is usually something interesting or exciting. The cool thing is that you don’t have to drive your parents nuts asking. Google, YouTube, the Gutenberg project, and a treasure trove of other resources exist to answer your questions. All you have to do is begin to ask things like “How do I make a perfect omelet?” or “Which stars at night are actually planets?” or “How do car alternators work?” There’s a magic thing that happens when you ask these questions about the world around you and find the answers: they become interesting and exciting. What’s more, the tendency to find the world interesting wears off on the people around you, especially your kids.

A final note on this topic: it took me decades of my life to realize that God created this world and everything in it for us to enjoy. This means that learning about the world is a way of enjoying a gift He has given us. Science, art, music, literature, math, and all the rest of it are a gift we were given to explore. One of the best things in life is to enjoy that gift from God.