Orion

Each year in winter, I receive a visitor. He's a rather flashy dresser, best known for his jeweled belt, which he wears everywhere. It easily catches my eye every time I see him. Three sparkling beacons, and I know he's there. His name is Orion, and he's a hunter, which is odd for a guy who has such a distinctive sense of fashion.

Orion is, of course, a constellation...stars hanging in space with no relationship to each other except the connections which my eye provides. From where I stand, breath hanging in the cold air, there's the belt...then his body, arm raised, warding off a wild animal or aiming a bow or wielding a shield, depending on the lore I read. 

Orion doesn't move or change, or at least he hasn't in my lifetime. He's predictable and consistent and obvious. He's a given, a known quantity. I can take him for granted. 
Or can I?

I'm a new graduate student, leaving behind two other careers to train for a third. I want to be a teacher, an expander of minds, an introducer of new things. But if I'm going to teach, first I have to learn, and then I'll learn again through teaching. And before I can learn, I need to unlearn. 

So, the first step is admitting that Orion isn't Orion. 

Orion is a collection of individual gassy flames, long distances from each other and my eyes. Because I see the sky as flat, the stars that make up his skeleton appear as bright dots on black velvet, arranged conveniently for my brain to recognize. 

But if I could leave Earth and travel to a point 90 degrees away from my current vantage point, I would no longer see Orion's belt, or Orion himself. Oh, the stars would still be there, but the three in a row that make up that beautiful belt would be scattered, because they're not lined up beside each other. 

Maybe I would see new constellations. Is one of Orion's belt stars now the ear of a fox? Maybe the tip of his bow becomes the foot of a satyr. Perhaps his stars, appearing together on a flat sky for me, are actually so far apart they're not even visible together in someone else's sky.

I have to say goodbye to what I know now in order to see something new. I have to unlearn to learn. 

Science, I think, is like this. We know lots of facts. We know there are facts we don't know. And we know things we don't realize we know.

But that fourth quadrant...that's the biggie. We don't know what we don't know. We don't know how much there is that we don't know. That's why we explore and change and correct and re-guess and give up and try again. Because there's so much we don't know. 

And it's the same with history. Dates, places, people...yes. Understanding why...no. 

Math: so much unknown beyond so much known. 

Music: a finite number of notes yielding an infinite number of patterns and new sounds. 

So many subjects to unlearn, and learn, and teach, and learn again. 

Let's get started.