An attempt at understanding without a system.
Sometimes it seems that learning is mistaken for acquisition. For order. For progress. Yet what we truly remember is often incomplete. Fragments. Scraps. A thought on a bus. A sentence from a book we never finished. And still, something remains.
What if learning isn’t a linear process, but a scattered one? What if memory doesn’t work like a shelf, but like forest soil: untidy, alive, threaded with roots that connect in darkness?
Perhaps learning rarely happens at the moment of reading, but much later. In half-sleep. On a walk. Or years after, when a similar problem arises and the solution suddenly appears, without knowing where it came from.
Maybe real learning isn’t what we repeat methodically, but what reaches us. What sticks, even if we didn’t mean to hold on to it. What slowly, quietly, almost secretly, connects to other pieces, until a pattern emerges.
People who learn like this are often overlooked in school. They rarely have the right answers ready. But they carry a deep net within of memories, inner images, impulses, and hidden connections. You can’t measure this net, but sometimes you can feel it. It forms not through force, but through attention.
You could call it fragmented learning. Or organic learning. Or maybe not learning at all – but simply becoming, over time. Maybe that’s enough.
