Learning Is The Art of Ignoring
Most people think of learning simply as a feat of acquisition. A pianist practices a chord by repeatedly pressing it, and eventually acquires the ability to play that chord at will. But this conception of learning misses an important detail: learning requires ignoring.
In our mind, every perception we perceive exists in one of two places: in our conscious attention or outside of it. Our attention's scarcity demands that only the new gets our attention, while the old hangs on the periphery. And what defines learning, if not our focused attention turning the new and unknown into the old and expected?
And so the chord, as the pianist practices it, moves gradually from the mind's center stage to its fringes, until the pianist can play the chord without thinking about it at all. He has come to ignore the chord. With his attention free he learns a sister chord, and then a chord progression, and then, eventually, after many more cycles of coming to ignore increasingly complex things—Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. A master pianist could perform such a piece while maintaining a conversation on the side. In mastery, he has come to ignore the piano itself.
Tragically, our heart reserves its empathy for the new, and gives only apathy to the tired antics of the old. Play a piece too often and its sweetness dies. Admire a painting too often and you will start inspecting its frame. Kiss your lover too often and you start wishing your lips met with someone else. The God of Irony makes the world, and all that we come to enjoy and love, slip through our fingers as we do what nature has fated we do: reach for more.
Two virtues, temperance and gratitude, grow from this fact. Temperance helps us to not reach; gratitude helps us hang on to what we fleetingly grasp.
Forever toward more. Forever we fight against ourselves.