Knowledge

I am sitting in my dorm room, looking out the window at a sunny and seasonably warm day. I sit here and once again experience one of the strongest emotions I have ever felt in my life, and one that continues to reoccur, and will continue until the vision is being played in front of my very eyes, instead of inside my head. The West has beckoned me before, and twice in my life I have answered, traveling to both the San Diego and Los Angeles areas in 2001, and San Francisco in 2004 with my family. In those years, I did not experience any unusual urge to visit the West, but in the past year, and especially in the past few months, there has been a consistent calling for me to experience traveling and perhaps living in the Western United States, and enjoying my life as it were meant to be, not tied into society as a student, or having to be taught unnecessary things, such as complex mathematics, or the science and anatomy of ancient species. These things that I deem unnecessary to learn certainly only apply to myself, as I am sure such topics greatly intrigue some people, and there is not harm to that. But for my own well being, and my own personal fulfillment, I can only envision myself learning from life's own experiences, those found in travel, adventure, risk, and days that hold the joy of not knowing what the next day will bring. I cannot learn what I need to know from the schooling I am receiving, such knowledge will not benefit me. However, I will stay here to fulfill the desires and needs of others, and earn a meaningless degree that simply says I have managed to tolerate the ridiculous method of standardized testing and formal schooling. I believe that I am not the one who needs to learn from them, rather they must learn from people like myself, who have realized that true and worthy knowledge comes solely from experiences and life itself, not organized classes with biased approaches and dictatorially run lessons. There is nothing to be learned from this method, at least not for myself, and yet I will continue to sit in the rooms and listen to the people who are superior to myself only because they have completed more years of schooling than I have. I will continue to stay at college and learn only outside of my classroom, and expect little knowledge to come from the curriculum they present. But I will continue to travel to the West in my mind, and teach myself through books, music, art, and imagination that I find interesting, because the only way to learn is to gain interest in the topic at hand, and there is no plausible way to force interest onto someone who cannot come across it naturally.