Life is Learning by Bryce

Life is Learning by Bryce - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

As I grow older, I see my friends and even family members, unfortunately, beginning to succumb to a life of routine, of work schedules and Netflix "binging," as they like to say, and weekends of going out or occasional short trips somewhere outside the city to break the monotony. With fatigue from work and the challenges of family life, it is understandable. I myself enjoy watching Netflix once in a while, and a night out does not hurt either, but I am wary of surrendering myself to this way of life. Sure, one could argue that documentaries and entertaining programs are capable of providing us with enough ammunition for personal growth, but I believe there is a difference between viewing such media and trying to study and understand the concepts and history behind a topic. An example is that of coral reefs: We all love seeing documentaries packed with imagery of fantastically colored organisms and strange coral structures, and understand their importance to maintaining diverse and healthy oceans. What happens after seeing something inspiring is more important though. Do we simply watch program after program in wonder (or dismay, often), or do we begin to take a deeper look at reefs, in this case, and learn about the science related to them, and try to become an active participant in finding solutions to save them from climate change and other human activities? This division between passively receiving information and actively learning is really what begins to mark our identities after we have finished our mandatory schooling for a comfortable survival (which I now consider to be at least a bachelor's degree). This gap between feelings of inspiration and doing something tangible as a result of that inspiration is quite wide. Sorry, but posting on Facebook generally doesn't count.

I feel like I have bridged that gap, and one of my teachers helped me do this. His name was Alexander. Alex, as he liked to call himself, was from the Ukraine and was a veteran of the Second World War. He was 84 years old at the time I first crossed paths with him, but he was on my college campus to learn English, which he already was speaking well by that time. For some reason, I sat down and began to study Russian with him on the first day we met, pondering the almost robotic and alien looking Cyrillic alphabet while he demonstrated the sounds associated with each letter. Our student-mentor relationship quickly became a friendship, and I began to study with him at his home. Alex was an impressive person. He sprinted up any and all stairs in defiance of his aging bones, walked at the pace of a slow jogger and enjoyed solving mathematical equations, all while occasionally sharing his stories of fighting Germans during the war, of being discriminated against for being Jewish and having to leave his home country as a refugee. For Alex, there was no such thing as retirement. He was in new country with a different language, but he was leading his life, and not being led around by it, and he was doing so with great sweeping strides, literally and figuratively, of course. This man had earned the right to some rest, some respite, what with holding off the German army and fleeing persecution, but he chose to continue learning and pushing himself, even at 84 years of age, an age at which others might simply choose to tap the power button and shrug off the extreme challenge of learning another language (trust me, it is difficult). He didn't though.
Alex never told me explicitly what his personal philosophy was, but his mere presence provided a lesson: Life is learning. Learning is not something we do for a while as a means to an end. It is both the means and the end. Learning brings on understanding and a richer existence that renews itself continually through a resulting natural desire for more knowledge in a sort of unending, positive feedback system. Now, whenever something appears daunting and seemingly insurmountable, I see Alex charging up the stairs of his apartment building and get back to the task at hand.

I think that is why I find myself, ten years after my experience with Alex, about to embark on my life's next journey, to California to study International Environmental Policy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and then serve in the Peace Corps as part of the same program. Now I have Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German under my belt, and am fascinated with conservation, ecology, economics and international affairs, and plan to bring my knowledge of those disciplines to bear on solving the challenges humanity must collectively overcome in the coming decades to survive.

I am alive and learning.