This is one of the most unique of the readings, happening very much in the live moment of household activities on this Sunday evening. Recording from the kitchen where I have my desk -- since my childhood, I've always enjoyed studying in the kitchen -- and streaming part of my weekly radio show, The Dead Zone (wrhu.org), which happened to be playing music from the Dead in Chicago! (there are no coincidences!) So being that I've recorded in the kitchen, my son, Jaime, makes a cameo, and the whole recording has the feeling of the Taoist spontaneity that is at the heart of the meditation. Indeed, I pick up on Lao Tzu, who was introduced into the conversation yesterday, and go into an extended jam on the relationship between Being and learning as a manifestation of The Way. I write also of the colloquial phrase, How's it going?, expressing the existential character of the relationship of Being and learning because it points to learning as ontological 'movement.' I write "This going on of our being identifies our being as a happening, an event."
February 13, 2014 was the 10th anniversary of the original experiment that produced 363 phenomenological mediations, published as 'Being and Learning' (Brill: 2012). Each day between Feb 2014-15, I returned to the original meditations, and my commentary is documented here. And then, again, on February 15, 2024, on the 20th anniversary of the first days of the original experiment, I revisit and comment on a daily basis, once again.
(20/10 yrs later) - I'm a day late on this 3.0 reflection -- family visiting -- but I wonder about the context ("household activities"). By the looks of my hair in this video, looks like there was quite a bit of activities happening, and it looks like my son, now very much a teenager, made a cameo in the video. What jumps out to me this day from the original meditation is the description of learning as "a happening, an event." If there is any descriptive category that has held over these many years, it's "the event," which describes the singularity of the learning experience, perhaps even the rarity or exceptionality of the experience. 20 years later I can admit that I didn't do enough in the original iteration to unpack "experience," and know this is a category I need to do more work on, especially because I am so committed currently to the event of learning as happening in the aesthetic experience.
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