Peripheral Visions

of learning in everything we do, like a mother balancing her child on one hip as she goes about her work with the other hand or uses it to open the doors of the unknown. Living and learning, we become ambidextrous.
    Systems of education are everywhere in ferment, visions of promise countered with proposals for increasing rigidity. The Japanese are as puzzled as the Americans—ostensibly for opposite reasons—and you can find editorials about the flaws of education systems from London to Manila. This suggests that many proposals have too narrow a focus, are directed at local problems when the entire concept of education needs to be rethought. Looking at the place of learning in other societies and times from this vantage point, it is reassuring to know that everywhere most of learning occurs outside the settings labeled as educational. Living and learning are everywhere founded on an improvisational base. The discovery of new needs may be followed by adding units to the syllabus, but it can also lead to the discovery of how human beings make do with partial understandings, invent themselves as they go along, and combine in complex undertakings without full agreement about what they are doing. These skills also are learned.
    Ambiguity is the warp of life, not something to be eliminated. Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making shift and making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with pattern, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity. Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. The multiple layers of attention involved cannot safely be brushed aside or subordinated to the completion of tasks. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.
    Starting from a Persian garden, this discussion will wander the paths of attention and improvisation in and out of four countries and across the life cycle. We will look for the sources of the bits and pieces stitched into improvisations and for the underlying stiffener that unifies; for the habits of learning and ways of building a repertoire from which to improvise, the metaphors that link one experience to another. Shared ways of seeing are socially constructed and currently, fashionably, criticized and deconstructed, but when you are able to attend to something new or to see the familiar in a new way, this is a creative act. I would call it a godlike act, except that the word evokes, for too many, a sense of distance and dominance, while seeing anew is a kind of intimacy; I would call it childlike, if it were not important to avoid blocking learning with the reminders of all that was onerous in childhood. In the ordinary creativity of moving through the world, we are both gods and children.
    Increasingly, we will cease to focus on learning as preliminary and see it threaded through other layers of experience, offering one of life’s great pleasures. There is this truth in reinforcement theory, that pleasure and survival are linked by learning. The capacity to enjoy, to value one experience over another, is the precondition of the capacity to learn, so that even the innate sucking reflex of infants is shaped within hours of birth by the rewards of success. Because learning is the most basic of human adaptive processes, we can hope that it will lead toward a relationship with the rest of the biosphere that is both satisfying and sustainable.
    There is a spiritual basis to attention, a humility in waiting upon the emergence of pattern from experience. The willingness to assimilate what has been seen or heard draws other life into increasingly inclusive definitions of the self. Looking, listening, and learning offer the modern equivalent of moving through life as a pilgrimage. Even death is a time to learn.
    This is a book of stories and reflections strung together to suggest a style of learning from experience. Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incident of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of