Exploratory Education

One way to learn is to cast your sails to the wind and go where you are called, throwing yourself into the most desirable prospects and winning thereby the full weight and momentum of all mistakes. If you are rich enough, you can go beyond the initial blood and anguish in overcoming inertia, and eventually reach a vantage sure to rend your beliefs and expectations as you contemplate the substance of joys, miseries, barrenness, and mysteries you have brought to awareness. This approach quickly dispels all polite book theories and television fiction about the nature of the world and possibility.

At worst you will destroy your soul or bring upon yourself lifelong suffocating burdens, but the cause will be clearly apparent, and this alone is an education obtained for a bargain, sure to make you a master of one subject. Even if you risk losing everything, this is no great loss, for polished brass tacks glimmer before you that will inevitably become acknowledged, and no one should expect very much from a sloganized civilization in denial of its decrepitude.

Social customs develop from adoption of approaches that demonstrate a functional purpose. What later appears to be obvious alternatives to these are usually faulty approaches not adopted by sensible people, though memory and sense are rare, and determination to cheat reality remains powerful. Fools, rascals, and the hurried among us employ shortcuts and imposture, rendering many into living warning signs that show us what happens down unlit paths.

But there is also the possibility that beyond every common, known, and easily calculated outcome, someone takes sight of a destination or opportunity that no one has previously attempted. No folklore or historical tales tell of it, no elders can offer wisdom about it, no scientist has ever considered it, and no accurate assessment of value or danger is possible as both possibilities are boundlessly speculable.

Each gambler uses their own personal considerations for how much he is willing to lose for a possible gain, what conjecture and imagined hints suggest might be won, what comparable or superior future prospects are likely -- and promptly discards all these for the feelings of the moments, being neither reasonable nor concerned with achieving good outcomes, but invested solely in the dramatics of the gamble.