Slow Learner

When I was young (you have to know I’m getting old when I start a sentence like this…). When I was young we used to have an encyclopaedia. Yes, something entirely different to wikipedia…

For those of a different generation. Encyclopaedia. Noun. “A book or set of books giving information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject and typically arranged alphabetically.” Knowledge of the world at your finger tips… before the internet.

I don’t believe we updated our set of Encyclopaedia Brittanica from the time I was in primary school until I finished high school. Knowledge and information changed slowly. There was time to get to know stuff.

Now everything is updated continually and we all have access to most of the information in the world on the go, on our phones.

Some of us also remember a time before fast food. When you bought things at the market, washed, cut, cooked and ate them at home.

Fast food seemed like a good idea in the 1960’s. What a revolution! Fill up as you go. No waiting. Satisfaction on the road. That was until we saw obesity and other food related health problem rise sharply through those intervening decades. The economic and business need to produce food fast and cheap means that “fast” now equals “unhealthy”. So now we have a slow food revolution. People are getting back to basics to take care of the body.

And at the same time as our slow food revolution, we are seeing a fast learning revolution. It seems we don’t learn from the past easily. So much online learning is quick and fast. Quickly take this course, quickly download an ebook, quickly, while its still available, participate in this online conference, summit, listen to another TED talk. Back in 2018 fast seemed like a good idea in learning…

The problem is, how much can we take in a once? How much knowledge can we digest and assimilate? And then actually embody?

Perhaps in 50 years we’ll look back at the explosion in available information and learning online and wonder how anyone could have thought that bigger, faster, more, more, more could have been better for our minds, bodies and nervous systems. Perhaps…

So here is the beginning of the slow learning revolution…