Learning at any age

This is the drain in our bathroom sink. It's pretty and it's called "Pegasus". And it's been my on again off again nemesis since we moved in nearly ten months ago. It has been a historically slow to drain drain. I don't remember if it was when we arrived, my guess is probably not.

I've never been learned in many of the practical arts, such as plumbing. So, as the drain became slow, I had to teach myself how to work with this situation and remedy it. I knew I didn't want to go the way of toxic liquid chemicals if I could help it. I tried a non-toxic pressurized declogger and it helped enough for weeks here and weeks there (by draining semi-slowly instead of really slowly). But, it never got to the root of the problem, which could be because I was using it incorrectly,

I discovered that enzyme decloggers work for organic matter, such as food, in kitchen sinks, but weren't recommended for bathroom sinks. I tended to think that the culprits in the bathroom sink were semi-regular showers of facial stubble and therefore would be more than enzymes could handle.

I was, I felt, in the unfortunate position of being the only person in the house who really cared that the sink was slow to drain and so would find myself fuming and glaring at the sink at odd points in the day, directing my pent up frustrations at an inanimate object, in a tiled arena that included a cast of two.

I have believed in the idea of learning as a sideways spiral for a long time...so long that I don't rmember anymore where I first learned about this theory. We learn things through our senses whether it is via seeing, hearing, gestalt, etc. then life continues and we don't necessarily activate that learning for awhile. But, then, the spiral curves around again and what we learned jumps forward and is applied to a new situation and voilá, synthesis, eureka, and then life moves on...

It occurs to me now that the Waldorf way of working with singular academic subject areas at a time (main lesson blocks) while others lie dormant for a period is an expression of this theory.

Today, I put into action something I've been thinking about for awhile. Years ago, I learned from Wendy and Stefan that one can use an untwisted wire hanger to unclog a toilet. That made an impression on me, the MacGyverness of it, using something at hand and simply reworking it into a handy tool. I plucked a wire hanger from the closet, untwisted it, and got to work.

In the end it wasn't the wire hanger that did the trick, but working with it and then going deeper into the process and experimenting that yielded ultimate success. I had conquered the drain and it was sweet victory.

(For some reason, I can't get the drain stopper out of the sink. I've looked under the sink and fiddled around with the stopper with the wire hanger, but have yet to figure out how to remove it. I dug out some very small pieces of gunk with the wire, but no where near what I imagined I would find. In the end, I discovered while manipulating the lever controlling the up and down movement of the drain stopper under the sink, that there was some sort of seal that was forming somewhere beyond the reach of the wire. Maybe the poking around helped, but I think it was the vigorous pumping that broke the seal that then cleared the drain.)

First helped out for awhile and Kinder expressed gratitude though he looked like he didn't understand what the fuss was all about. Life goes on.