Tag: life long learning

Mission Statement

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 1 Comment

Hello, friends!

Today is New Year’s Day, so I thought today would be a great day to restate the mission statement of this blog—except it seems I never stated the mission of this blog in the first place.  I could’ve sworn that I had.  Maybe that’s because my mission seems self-evident.  I love space.  I love learning about space, and I love sharing what I learn with others.

The learning part is really important to me.  My love of space doesn’t mean just looking up at the stars and thinking, “Ooooh, pretty!”  I don’t enjoy wonder for wonder’s sake.  My love for space means looking up at the stars, wondering what’s up there, wondering who’s out there, and then putting in the time and effort to find answers (to the best of my ability as someone who’s bad at math and doesn’t have any professional scientific training).

Learning is hard.  Finding good sources of information can be tricky, and even when you do find trustworthy sources, science is still a challenging subject.  Scientists aren’t always the most engaging or entertaining communicators.  But if learning this stuff were easy, I don’t think it would be fun.  The greater the challenge, the greater the reward when you finally do understand a difficult and complicated concept.

So on this blog, I want to tell you about all the cool stuff I learn about space.  I also want to talk about the process I go through to learn this stuff, because the research process is part of the fun.  If you don’t know much about space, I hope to inspire you to love space like I do.  And if you already love space, then I hope to inspire you to love space even more!

But there will be some of you who don’t really care about space and never will.  I want you to know that that’s okay.  We can still be friends.  Not everybody has to love the same things.  I have an I.R.L. friend who’s not very interested in space, no matter how much I talk about it, but she paid me one of the very best compliments I’ve ever received: “You make me want to go learn stuff.”

That’s the real mission of this blog: to spread the love of learning.  I want to set a good example by picking a topic that fascinates me (space, obviously!) and learning everything I can about it.  For you, maybe it’s sports trivia, or Greek antiquities, or horses, or the history of music in video games, or the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright… it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that learning is one of the greatest joys in life.  I love learning, and I hope you do, too.

Thanks for reading, friends!  Talk to you soon!

P.S.: If you like my art, click here to visit my art store on RedBubble.  Even if you don’t want to buy anything, just visiting and maybe clicking the “like” buttons on my art will help me a lot (and if you do want to buy something, that would help me a lot, too!).

IWSG: Just Keep Learning

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 22 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Rebecca Douglass, Natalie Aguirre, Cathrina Constantine, and Louise Barbour.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more!

A long time ago, I was talking to some friends about space.  I don’t remember what space thing I was talking about, specifically; I just remember it was something I didn’t understand at the time, and I was trying to learn more about it.  Anyway, I was telling my friends about all the work I was doing, trying to learn about this one specific space thing, and I guess my enthusiasm was showing, which prompted one of my friends to say: “You make me want to go learn stuff.”

To this day, I still consider that to be the single nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.  I love space, obviously, but even more than that, I love learning.  That’s what drives me to be a writer.  On a superficial level, I write because I want to share my love of space with others, and I want to show off some of the cool space facts I’ve learned over the years.  But on a deeper, more fundamental level, I write because I want to show people that learning is fun, that learning creates joy.  Yes, learning can be hard sometimes, but the struggle of learning a difficult or complicated thing increases the joy when you finally do understand that thing.

Writing is not always easy for me.  Sometimes I get discouraged.  Sometimes I get frustrated.  Sometimes I wonder: “Why am I doing this?”  But that thing my friend said to me, all those years ago, is a good reminder: “You make me want to go learn stuff.”

I realize not everybody loves space as much as I do, and I realize not everybody wants to learn everything there is to know about space the way I do.  But if you read any of my stuff, and if you still don’t care much about space, then I hope I can at least inspire you to go learn stuff about the things you do care about, the things that do interest you, the things that you do love.

The art in today’s post—that drawing of a brain hovering over an open book—is my own original work.  If you like my art, please consider checking out the I-Love-Space store on RedBubble.  Shopping on RedBubble is a great way to support artists (like me!) so that we can keep doing what we do.  Thank you!