LIFE: Learning Is ForEver

There are a lot of people in this world. Of course, we cannot accurately how many people are dying or giving birth per day, per hour, per minute, or even per second. These are LIFE! Some enjoy of being good, wealthy, and happy, but some of them are poor, living without clothes and proper settlement, struggling and exposing their selves to something very bad and awful for the near future of better and better life. If you go to the dictionary, I have the Concise Oxford one (11th Edition), they define “life” as the existence of an individual human-being or animal. “Is it that? Of course, yes… This is what I see in my dictionary!” If we take a look at this phrase a little bit, you will notice a word “existence.” Existence is the fact or state of existing. So, we will ask ourselves “why do we exist in this world?” Start answering this question together we will learn something new about our lives!

Believe me! There are reasons for why we are here. We are happy when we know ourselves and others such as friends, colleagues, and our family’s members; we keep moving our lives in a very long journey towards what we want. From that, people are trying to set up their goals and objectives to move a little faster in order to get what they want. After that, they strike for competitions and new challenges whereby they can learn something new every day, every hour, every minute, and every second that they hold. I still repeat what I believe about the concept of an “Invisible Hand” from Adam Smith – Father of Economics, wrote in his book: “An inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (published in 1776). The invisible hand concept says that “through the self-interest, society is naturally guided.” The only reason for having life in this Universe because we are all believe in hope, we are all believe in something new, something better by which it can lead us to what we aim for. So, that is why there was the natural evolution from being a kind of special monkey to a human-being that make our current lives exist in this world. The unlimited ideas of non-stop actions/improvements give us today’s lives and contribute to the whole contemporary community and society.

Because of that, I write this small one-page text and give the title to it as “LIFE: Learning Is ForEver.” I my point of view, we need to split our life into a lot of learning paths. Let me raise my own example! From Kindergarten to Primary School, I learn to survive in a very tough life. Since my family had a very little money and I was also sick a lot during that time, my parents did not allow me carrying any money to school. But at the meant time, I had to deliver and show the best study result to my family. If not, my parents would make it tougher. From Secondary School to High School, I started to be a little independent because I had my own bike and friends. At that moment, I learnt to compete with other good students and started growing my own educational life. I invented my own Geometry, Number Theory, and Limit exercises. That was very exciting! However, at University, I realized something very different. One of my English professors, Robert, told me a lot about asceticism, how to describe lifestyle in society and abstaining from something bad in life. This is when I started reading fictions (Sherlock Holmes – The Hound of the Baskervilles is the first fiction that I read) and learning a lot of more about sociology and psychology. I smelt the world very different. I hated unfair competition and other bad hidden agenda. And I moved my learning path of something very new comparing to what I had learnt so far. Now, I am in another learning world as well…

In conclusion, I will say LIFE stands for Learning Is ForEver. But it is not always like that because some of you may say “no.” LIFE can stand for Love Is ForEver, Laugh Is ForEver, or maybe Liberty has only In the Factious Earth, and so on. So, I always welcome all of the comments from all of the readers about what I wrote here. Learning is helping us a lot in releasing stress, keeping our lives refresh (like pressing F5 if you use Microsoft Windows), and assist us to get rid of many, many bad things.

Sochheka Ong

Phnom Penh, March 11, 2010