Peripheral Visions

household, a businessman may stop off at the end of the workday with flowers for his mother and sit and drink tea with her, listening to her advice, while his wife is at home preparing a meal and looking after young children. Not surprisingly, social change is less attractive to women for whom the best years of their lives are still ahead under the traditional system. In fact, both men and women may be more at peace with the losses that accompany aging in cultures where the old are respected and life has a built-in sense of progression. The Western preoccupation with progress may be an effort to compensate for a personal sense of being condemned to regress.
    Many adults only take on the challenge of profound change when they are desperate. This is why so much of adult learning is packaged today as therapy and why it must often offer the compensation of membership in a new community or relationship. We have begun to develop rituals for adults who find themselves in need of drastic change and new beginnings, rituals that give some value to the surrender of adult confidence. Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step groups teach that they cannot help you until you hit bottom and relinquish your sense of being in control of your life—apparently it is helpful to get the acknowledgment of weakness over with in order to make new learning possible.
    The alternative would be to conserve the openness and need for new learning that we find in infants, by making it a part of identity. If I were to move to a new country now, I doubt that I would become fluent in yet another non-Western language, because doing so does get harder with the passage of time, but I would learn enough to cope. Learning languages is part of my sense of myself. Following the Turkish proverb that says her lisan bir insan , “every language a person,” each new language has come to represent an enrichment to me. I know how to do it, I enjoy doing it, and frankly after writing this paragraph I’d be embarrassed not to. I also know that eventually, even though I may look like an outsider, people will recognize their words in my mouth and respond, and that too has become necessary to me.
    All too often those who can teach or lead with authority are armored against new learning, while those who are open to new learning are made diffident about expressing what they do know by the very fact that they deem it tentative. The best learners are children, not children segregated in schools but children at play, zestfully busy exploring their own homes, families, neighborhoods, languages, conjuring up possible and impossible worlds of imagination. Only a little way from the front door, in other parts of the city or in forest or meadow, exploration continues to be possible throughout life. Some traditions emphasize this, expecting those who have leisure to fill it with explorations of the arts or natural history. The eighteenth-century idea that a gentleman might collect beetles, read unfamiliar texts of the classics, or conduct experiments played a role in the emergence of modern science.
    There is a famous story about two visitors to the Ames experiments in Princeton. Adelbert Ames had set up a series of boxes and rooms (if an artist did it today it would be called an installation) that created optical illusions by distorting perspective. Looking through a slit that allows vision with only one eye, the visitor was invited to touch various points with a stick, but because of deliberately distorted clues of perspective the stick kept missing. Eisenhower, it is said, lost his temper when he visited, threw down the stick, and refused to continue. He had a vein in his high, bald forehead that used to pulse visibly when he was angry or frustrated. Einstein, it is said, was fascinated when he encountered the same errors, using them to explore further.
    The two men had clearly found their ways to greatness in the niches that fit their temperaments, but they were also shaped by the conventions of the worlds in which they worked. Generals and presidents are expected to be decisive. An open mind, the willingness to learn from mistakes, the willingness to admit ignorance—these are not widely valued or rewarded in the circles where Eisenhower developed. When political leaders hesitate or revise their views, we mistake it for weakness, not strength. As a society, we need to consider whether those conventions might be altered, whether a little more tolerance for ambiguity