Learning is exhausting and often painful. It has to be practiced. It has to be endured. My experience with learning is that I rarely progress directly towards my goal. Instead, as I’m learning, my undertanding starts down on different paths simultaneously and converges somewhere around the goal much later.

I like to imagine it as a sea. On either side of the sea are pieces of land, one is where I stand - the state where I don’t know anything about a topic and the other is where I have a usable understanding.

When I start learning, I feel like small islands start to grow out of the water, slowly, all over the map. They are tiny at first but they grow larger and larger. Not at the same rate though. Some stay tiny for a long time, others grow larger quickly. I can’t yet get anywhere because there is no land between them but I’m starting to see some structure.

The goal is still out of sight but there is a clear pattern: there is more and more land wher I’ll be able to go eventually.

As I keep reading and as I work through examples and exercises, even more land rises and some islands now be come connected with each other. Some concept becomes tractable - I’m not sure yet how they’ll fit the big picture but it is starting to make sense.

This part of the learning process can last very long and can be painful to go through because I don’t see a clear path to my goal, everything just keeps popping up and the whole map is more and more chaotic. I see more and more stuff and still don’t know how I’ll get from one to the next. Sometimes I feel like I need take a break, often for weeks or months, sometimes I get desperate and feel that I’ve hit a wall.

Then, eventually, with more work and perseverance a path might reveal itself across the sea. It is not straight at all, there are lots of turns, valleys, mountains, but now there is a path to the other piece of land. Somehow the pieces of the puzzle came together and now I understand.

Finding the path after months or years of trying is an almost euphoric feeling and so learning is very rewarding, even addictive to some degree.

And that is an encouraging thought

as Gandalf said.

This is a reminder not to give up. With enough work, the path will show itself.