Book 105 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title – You Were Born to Question This World!

Book – At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

Book Description: “Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up." Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home."

Reflection:

Bill Bryson does it again! This man is a worldly treasure, and I aspire to, one day, consume anything and everything he has ever produced.

At Home was such an incredible learning adventure about things we see and use every day to operate our lives and have probably never given them a second thought. We assume we understand…we don’t.

His books are what this Year of Magical Learning adventure is all about. This journey is about learning to be open to seeing the world around you differently, to ask questions, to explore, to use your imagination, to think, to change paradigms, to challenge your assumptions, to not be afraid to ask why, to discover something new, to share your unique perspective with others, to be fascinated with this world, humanity, and all of the other life forms that are blessed to call this planet their home.

We talked about the idea of living life with less certainty and more inquiry in a past reflection from the book The Biggest Bluff. We talked about the fact that we are born to question with children asking between 200-300 questions EACH DAY from the book A More Beautiful Question. We talked about our superpower being our imaginations that we learned from the book Sapiens. We talked about how humans are the composers of this world with our unique ability to bring things together that don’t make sense until they do that we learned about in The Entangled Life.

Don’t be afraid to embrace your humanity!

This is who we are! This is what you were born to do!

You were born to look around your house, like Bill Bryson, and ask yourself, “Why do I do this? Why do I use this? Where did this come from? Who thought of this? What is its purpose? How can I make this better?”

You were born to then share what you learned and your unique perspective with the everyone that will listen.

You were born to question this world, use your imagination, create, and share.

You were born to find your own beautiful question and never stop searching for the answers.

Question: What is something you can see right now that you don’t understand and want to learn more about?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - At Home

YOML Bookstore - At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson