Meditation for the New Year: Kahlil Gibran

I think of the unschooling, self- directed pursuit of knowledge and learning along the lines of Lebanese poet, Kahlil Gibran's piece below:

In this world two processions pass by:one is that of old men bowed down by age, who walk leaning on their sticks which bend beneath their weight, and although the path leads downward, they are breathless and worn out with fatigue.
The other is of the procession of the young who advance with winged steps, who sing as if their throats were fitted with silver strings and who brave the obstacles which are subdued by the majesty of the mountain slopes and won over by the magic of the summits.

And you, in which procession do you take your place?

Ask yourself the question in the silence of the night. And when you finally decide to come down to earth, judge whether you are a slave of yesterday or a free man of tomorrow.

I tell you that the children of yesterday walk in the funerals of history,it has shaped them and they have shaped it themselves. They cling to a cord which has worn thin with time;if it breaks-and this will surely happen soon-they will fall into the depths of forgetfulness.

And I tell you that they lived between crumbling walls;as soon as the storm breaks out-and it will break out soon-their heads will be buried beneath the rubble, and their dwellings will be reduced to tombs.
In truth i tell you that all they think,say, and write, as well as their deeds, are no more than chains, and because they themselves are too weak, they cannot carry them, but on the contrary the chains will carry them away be their weight.

As for the children of tomorrow, they are those who have been summoned by life, they have followed it with a firm step, their heads held high. They are the dawn of a new age. ... They are not very numerous among the crowd. But they stand like a flowering branch in a burnt-out forest, like a grain of wheat in a haystack.

Nobody knows them but they know each other. They are like the mountain tops that can see and hear each other, quite unlike the caverns which are deaf and blind. They are like the seed sown in a field by the hand of God. It will burst forth from its husk with the strength of its flesh, it will say like a radiant plant facing the sun,it will become a majestic tree, who roots take hold in the heart of the earth, who branches aspire to the depths of the firmament.