As a college student many years, I vividly remember sitting in a meeting at a Quaker conference and heard a man (I think we as an administrator at Indiana University) describe spiritual life as a matter of learning, forgetting, relearning, forgetting again (and you get the picture). That was one of the most depressing things I could imagine hearing, in large part because it sounded true.

It's amazing to me how much of life seems to involve learning the same thing over and over again. This is clearest, for me, in the domain of exercize and health, and is prominently in my mind as a I get ready to run this year's marathon (the Twin Cities
Marathon on October 5 -- http://twincitiesmarathon.org/). Marathons serve as good indices of my physical health, and it's interesting that my performance is as variable as it is. It certainly does get harder as I get older to get in shape and the consequences of mistakes loom larger. This year, for example, I broke my little toe walking around barefoot at home. Not a big deal, although it was surprisingly painful. But then I altered my running style enough that I was getting quite a lot of pain in other parts of my leg (something called the periformis muscle). Stretching helps -- http://www.halhigdon.com/15Ktraining/Stretch.htm, but I just recently discovered that using a Nordic trak doesn't require the movement that causes pain later on. That's great, and it's wonderful to be able to exercize for a long time without feeling it later on, but the really sad part is that isn't as though I haven't figured this all out before.

Perhaps by posting here I'll have something to look back on later and feel even more stupid, or just recognize that there seem to be rhythms to learning and forgetting just as there to everything else in life.