Bok Choy.

Until a few weeks ago I don’t think I had ever heard of it.

London and I took a cooking class together and it was one of the foods we learned to prepare.  It’s leafy (kind of) and green and we learned to prepare it simply by basically wilting it with olive oil and salt over heat.  We served it up alongside our Chinese meal of potstickers and meatballs at our class.

Following our class I’ve been seeing bok choy everywhere.  I picked up some last week when we reinvented our Chinese meal at home with everyone and Piper and Otto were in charge of the “wilting”.  (By the way, what might look like plenty of bok choy at the beginning cooks down to an incredibly small amount of bok choy by the end.)

Isn’t it funny how that works?

A month ago I would have told you I’d never eaten bok choy.  Now I’ve paid money for it and added it to a Thursday night dinner.

I’ve been educated, you might say, in the ways of bok choy.  I’ve been introduced and it has changed me.

Sure, bok choy is a tiny change.  I’m not passionate about bok choy and I’m not blending it into smoothies or writing poetry about it or finding ways to serve it for breakfast.   I’m not obsessed with bok choy.  (Although I’ve now typed the word bok choy so often in the last few minutes that I feel a little obsessed.)

But my point is – I didn’t know something existed last month and now I’m incorporating it a tiny bit into my life.

I think that’s how education changes us.  How people change us.  How relationships change us.

I think that’s the formula for how we move from being closed off to being open, from being uninformed, to being educated.

We need an introduction.

Sometimes just a small one.

When we encounter a new idea, a new thought, we have the potential to be changed by that thought, by that idea.

(This change can be positive or negative.  It can even be a little neutral – like bok choy.  Not life shattering, but still visible.)

Tennyson once wrote, “I am a part of all that I have met.”  

I read that line probably two decades ago and I’ve never forgotten it.

People, education, knowledge, stuff, situations shape us and mold us and make us and change us.

Not only am I a part of all that I have met, but all that I have met is a part of me.

It’s what I love most about being so intimately involved in the education of my own children.  The front row seat to what makes their imaginations soar, to what new words they learn and how their knowledge propels them into new avenues and adventures.

Last month it was bok choy.  This month it might be the multiplication facts (oh, for the love, let it be the multiplication facts that stick this month) or it might be a phrase from a novel or the perspective of a new friend.

There’s a little mystery waking up every day to discover what will change us and find us, of what will make us and mold us.  Of how we will form and grow and morph and become.

How have you been educated recently?

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