Expansive Learning and Love and rawrrr
I have been thinking about the self-expansion model of love, and how it reminds me of Engestrom's theory of expansive learning.
So like, obviously the self-expansion model for love frames the expansion of the self through loved ones, which would be more in-line with non-expansive learning, the kind that happens in schools where one person learns from the other (although if 2 people are attracted to each other because they both see the opportunity to expand through the other, then both are experts in their own right and they 'teach' each other through non-direct means, which I think is neat for being an example of collaborative learning).
I think of expansive learning as not just the learning that contributes some new knowledge to humanity's ever-growing bucket of knowledge, but also the more mundane ways in which individuals create new knowledge that may have been discovered many times before by many other individuals, but which is new to this person. (I need to review the theory some to check whether my understanding is in line with Engestrom's description because that book was A. Lot.) Engestrom describes expansive learning cycles as a transition from individual to collective, and I was reminded of this while reading about love.
The work I have read on love as expansion say that when couples have sort of started to exhaust learning from each other, they can renew the feeling of expansion by engaging in expansive activities together. Trying new shared hobbies, learning new things. A lovely example of expansion done in collaboration.
This also reminds me of something I said during grad school, a version of my thesis that was never written because I couldn't figure out where to start- I believe that learning more about and experiencing more of the world is a way of loving it. To grow and expand as a person, we have to fall a little bit in love with more and more little things.
One of the routes I took trying to explain this was to write about wilderness, which I was reminded of when, in learning by expanding, I read "A genuine expansive cycle inevitably produces not only civilization but also an ingredient of wilderness."
Wilderness is that which we can't control, because if we controlled it, it would fundamentally change the thing. It is that which is beyond our grasp and control. When we give ourselves over to collective endeavours, when we enter into a relationship that we allow to change us, we give up some control of our self.
Or, at least, I resonate with this, but I don't know if others identify so readily with wilderness. Hehe, rawrrr