You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

by Eleanor Roosevelt

The essential thing is to learn.

Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren’t they?

There is no experience from which you can’t learn something. When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense. And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach...

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. But this, at least, I believe with all my heart: In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child’s education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.

Education provides the necessary tools, equipment by which we learn how to learn.

“You are giving me back what I gave you,” she said, “and it does not interest me. You have not sifted it through your own intelligence. Why was your mind given you but to think things out for yourself?”

Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can grow only as long as we are interested.

What is essential is to train the mind so that it is capable of finding facts as it needs them, train it to learn how to learn.

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.

Book education cannot accomplish this by itself. It needs the supplement and the stimulus of the exchange of ideas with other people. In particular, it means learning from other people. There is no human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

After a while I had acquired a certain technique for picking their brains.

There is a wonderful word, why?, that children use. All children. When they stop using it, the reason, too often, is that no one bothered to answer them, no one tried to keep alive one of the most important attributes a person can have: interest in the world around him. No one fostered and cultivated the child’s innate sense of the adventure of life.

And she had a rarer quality—she could listen.

We all know the frustrating experience of trying to talk out a problem and discovering that our chosen confidant is giving us only divided attention, or frankly thinking of something else, or waiting to get in a word about some problem of his or her own.

This part of learning—learning as you go—gives life its salt. And this, too, comes back primarily to interest. You must be interested in anything that comes your way.

If we can keep that flexibility of mind, that hospitality toward new ideas, we will be able to welcome the new flow of thought from wherever it comes, not resisting it; weighing and evaluating and exploring the strange new concepts that confront us at every turn.

We cannot shut the windows and pull down the shades; we cannot say, “I have learned all I need to know; my opinions are fixed on everything. I refuse to change or to consider these new things.” Not today. Not any more.

If this sounds heavy and oppressive, then the essential point has been missed. Learning can be a game. Imagination, for instance, is always a game. I think it would be interesting to analyze a little bit what imagination is. Actually, it is the power to use whatever you have become conscious of and to project yourself beyond what you know into new situations and new thoughts, and develop them, so that you can see things in your mind’s eye which you have never actually seen.

This power of imagination is a kind of defense in childhood. You get away from the realities. It makes you important to yourself.

This is why play is so important in early childhood...in education!

Of course, unless it is checked, imagination can remain only a means of escape; but if it is nourished and directed, it can become a flame that lights the way to new things, new ideas, new experience.

but when he grows up he will have absorbed, unconsciously, the impact and meaning of his surroundings. That is what makes a nation’s culture.

The kinds of things with which you surround a child will sink into his consciousness.

Many people seem to go through life without seeing. They do not know how to look around them. Only when you have learned that can you really continue to learn about people, about conditions, about your own locality.

If you can develop this ability to see what you look at, to understand its meaning, to readjust your knowledge to this new information, you can continue to learn and to grow as long as you live and you’ll have a wonderful time doing it.

So valid in today’s culture!

FEAR has always seemed to me to be the worst stumbling block which anyone has to face.

But the withholding of information from a child either frustrates him or makes him seek it for himself. And the trouble with the latter method is that it is apt to make the child feel both guilty and dishonest.

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

I watched the boy struggling with his private hell and my imaginary fear seemed shameful.

Timidity and shyness are fears of this sort. Unimportant, perhaps, but they are crippling to self-confidence and to achievement.

Our doubts are traitors And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt.

If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won’t be shy.

Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you. It’s your attention to yourself that is so stultifying. But you have to disregard yourself as completely as possible. If you fail the first time then you’ll just have to try harder the second time. After all, there’s no real reason why you should fail. Just stop thinking about yourself.

A great deal of fear is a result of just “not knowing.” We do not know what is involved in a new situation. We do not know whether we can deal with it. The sooner we learn what it entails, the sooner we can dissolve our fear.

When the flu epidemic reached Washington in 1918, it proved to be a major catastrophe in the overcrowded city. Temporary shelters were put up for the thousands of victims, often in places without even cooking facilities. The Cabinet wives and the wives of the under secretaries agreed to supply food to certain of these shelters every day. My particular assignment was to provide large cans of soup for one particular shelter. I went there every day and came to know some of the people and to realize when there were curtains around a bed that someone was dying or had died.

Wow. Would today’s Cabinet ladies do the same?

Every time you meet a crisis and live through it, you make it simpler for the next time. If you draw back and say, “I am afraid to do that,” because you might do or say something wrong or you might make a mistake, you will become timid and negative as a person.

Today the world faces a great challenge: on one side a government preserved by fear, on the other a government of free men.

I haven’t ever believed that anything supported by fear can stand against freedom from fear. Surely we cannot be so stupid as to let ourselves become shackled by senseless fears. The result of that would be to have a system of fear imposed on us.

I learned that the ability to attain this inner calm, regardless of outside turmoil, is a kind of strength.

My husband said that being President of the United States meant that you saw more kinds of people, took up more subjects, and learned more about a variety of things than anyone else. But it required complete concentration on the person you were with and on what he was saying.

We create vacuums for ourselves by sheer apathy.

A FEW years ago, someone asked me for my definition of a mature person. Here it is: “A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world all of us need both love and charity.”

One must be willing to have knowledge of oneself.

The knowledge of how little you can do alone teaches you humility.

understand your limitations

Actually, an important part of self-knowledge is that it gives one a better realization of the inner strength that can be called upon, of which one may be quite unaware.

Life teaches you that you cannot attain real maturity until you are ready to accept this harsh knowledge, this limitation in yourself, and make the difficult adjustment. Either you must learn to allow someone else to meet the need, without bitterness or envy, and accept it; or somehow you must make yourself learn to meet it. If you refuse to accept the limitation in yourself, you will be unable to grow beyond this point.

That is learning to accept what other people are unable to give you.

So it is a major part of maturity to accept not only your own shortcomings but those of the people you love, and help them not to fail when you can.

This.