Marcus -
My father, for better or worse, wanted/needed huge swaths of well
traveled territory to learn within. He went from Boy Scouts to Navy to
College to Civil Service, wearing uniforms much of that time, and
learning (by rote) the many standard forms they presented. It made him
feel safe, it let him be useful/performing in places he otherwise might
not have.
Somehow that sent me in an opposite direction, appreciating the core
tools, formalisms, methodologies not as an end, but as a means or more
to the point, a beginning, a point of departure.
As I matured, I *did* discover that I was in fact often/usually
(re)inventing as I went and as you so aptly point out, I'm thankful for
having done so... the things I was "given" were never mine in the way
the things I "created" or "discovered" were. We are a curious species
and maintaining/feeding that curiosity seems to be an important part of
our nature.
I would say my father's curiosity was limited to exploring a vast
landscape of things already laid out for him while mine was to blunder
around in wildernesses often of my own making, only to discover that I
was actually inside of a park so well groomed that at times it felt to
be a wilderness... early on, I resented discovering that my
"inventions" were really "re-discoveries" but at some point, I began to
appreciate that with some of them I was adding valuable nuances too.
So rather than "knowing the names of the turtles all the way down", I
got to/had to make up names for them as I met them, and only later
discover that they had been named many times already.
It seems to me the folks that are given the names don't value the
names. Clearly there is value in standard language for technical
communication, but harder for me to imagine being taught something but
otherwise having no intuition for it. I guess that's what many people
expect, though?
Marcus
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