Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

If we want to appreciate Elvis Costello's music go to Mamen's link, if we want to appreciate a particular person's music tastes find someone like Josean, but understand this about my thinking, it is not to tell people how they should live your life, what they should like or not like and it is not about changing a single thing about who they are - but noticing in myself when I have encroached into trying to change others. 

My default or reset position is to get back to my learning and that is why I like attending a college toastmasters club - because all the activities that occur and all the speeches that are made or evaluations that are given are from the perspective of the learner and not the student. 

One might ask how the perspective of the learner and student be different.  The difference is scale, as a learner there is one of me, but as a student I am one of many.  How many times have we been a student but not learned that much, maybe even regressed a little in the actuality of our learning.  There is no guarantee that as a student we are learning, especially if we are half-attentive studying something we already know.

When Elvis Costello wrote his song he had a target in mind which is how the media project what it is they want to project and this has been a part of a traditional media.  Wait a minute, pause and then I thought that we are no longer seated occupants of traditional media, today it is just media, unless we are thoroughly stuck in the past, like some tribal warlord who does not want his society to change and recognizes that we are all, here in the West, affected by the media we receive, rather than the thinking we personally undertake not to get distracted by violence.

This means I am media and I acknowledge that fact.  So if I acknowledge the one-way effects of traditional media, I acknowledge my thinking as media but that is what separates a student from a learner.  A student may treat me as a master or a thought leader and study what it is I do, and if they continue to do that - then they did not learn much from me. 

The first unit of learning I accrue is from what it is I write, because only I know the root cause as to why it is I am thinking any particular thing.  In that thinking is the realization that we do have an effect on people, just like traditional media has an effect on all of us.  So I must be mindful of that effect.  My learning truth only partially exists in the present moment.   I can use the way back machine of my past thoughts and go back nearly 20 years and see how my thoughts deposited back then, look now.

At the same time I know that I cannot learn everything there is to know because that is like creating a bucket list item that says "I will visit every corner of the universe".  The universe has no corners, it is endless and what we can learn is endless to - so there needs to be limits, there needs to be a realization when it is I have spread myself to thin - or getting caught in the web of media that is no different to the broadcast impulses of traditional media.

I can enjoy this Elvis Costello song because it is on his wayback machine.  There are plenty of other forms of media to choose from and so I reject being stuck in one place simply because of the accident of time and place - if I am in this particular place - it is just a single point from which radiates whatever inner desire for what emerges within me.  It is when others define that emergence that misunderstandings begin, because emergence is what emerges from within us, and for me a great learner is wise and watchful to that emergence. 

It is this emergence I watch for in others and I don't equally want to misunderstand their emergence.   This is not the world most people live in.  That world has been defined by traditional media and by the world of education where learning is controlled by curriculum and not by emergence.   Even University students follow a certain mode of thinking about how they should learn and yet this is not the only mode of learning.  In emergence there is no bibliography, there is only emergence.   That does not signify originality because much of what emerges within us, also emerges within others too - but I want my emergence to flow openly.

Learning media is not social media - either it is just media or it is conditioning of media and the human condition should still be called human conditioning.  Unless I am learner of that condition, which is me.  What is interesting about utilizing media as learning, there are many caveats and one of those caveats is one Elvis Costello expresses so well :

I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord please don't let me be misunderstoodElvis Costello from his song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"