101 Ways To Get Educated by YES! editors and advisors
-Grow enough grain for one loaf of bread -- and make and eat the loaf
-Answer ALL the questions of a 3 year old for a week
-Spend a day alone in a wild place
-Follow your trash to its final resting place
-Collect food and blankets and spend a day giving them to homeless people taking the time to stop and talk about life
-Help in the birth of a lamb, cow, or horse
-Visit a slaughter house (try to withhold judgment)
-Organize a rite of passage ceremony for an adolescent, someone at mid-life, or yourself
-Switch genders for the day
-Build a house (your own, or for Habitat for Humanity)
-Ask a low rider how the lifters on their car work
-Apprentice yourself to someone you've always wanted to learn from
-Take a picture of you and all your stuff in front of the place where
you live. Compare it to the pictures in Peter Menzel's Material World
-Read the sacred texts of another tradition
-Imagine your most delicious relationship and then go first
-Work for a week on an assembly line
-Spend a week without stepping in a car. Pay attention to how your town looks from a bike, bus, or sidewalk
-Exchange tutoring with a teenager - math or bicycle repair in exchange for Web browsing, skate boarding, dance, or ??
-Go to someone else's church, synagogue, or place of worship
-Go on a vision quest
-Take a dance class from a different culture
-Interview the oldest person you can find; record the conversation
-Interview a child
-Imagine a day in your life 15 years from now
-Plant and care for a tree
-Ask yourself, "What if everyone in the world behaved the way I am behaving?"
-Get the names of the favorite books of your dentist, grocery store
clerk, mother, co-worker, and your minister/rabbi/priest or spiritual
guide. Read those books
-Pretend to be someone else on the Internet
-Trace your water supply back to its source - and follow it down the drainpipes to its destiny
-Finger paint
-Spend a day in a neighborhood where you've never been before - without carrying any money
-Ask your friends, and your ex-friends, to anonymously send you a list of your five best and five worst character traits
-Live for a day off your garden
-Channel surf for an evening; ask yourself what about the programs is drawing people
-Be quiet for 5 minutes per day; increase gradually to 20
-Ask a young person what's on his or her mind and heart, and listen (don't try to 'fix it')
-Figure out when and on what part of your dwelling the sun's rays fall
at different times of year (for extra credit: calculate the
photovoltaic potential of your roof)
-Take a year off
-Read a foreign newspaper
-Meditate on the life of your unborn grandchild
-Talk to the janitor
-Assume that everything is your responsibility, if not your fault
-Examine a handful of compost or rich soil under a microscope
-Go without food for three days
-Watch a child being born
-Write a creation myth
-Visit an observatory, and look at the stars through a big telescope
-Map the creeks, streams, and rivers in your watershed
-Choose six jobs that interest you; find someone to interview for each and spend a day working alongside them
-Watch a snail
-Find out what percentage of the world's financial wealth is owned by
the top 50 corporations, and how much by the 50 wealthiest people
-Visit the emergency ward of a major hospital
-Sleep outside under the stars
-Discuss these questions with a friend : If the Universe is finite,
what happens at its edge ? If it's infinite, how did it get there ? If
the Universe started 15 billion years ago, what was there before it
started? Does time go on forever ?
-Visit a spiritual healer
-Find out what the clerk at the grocery store is thinking about
-Follow your electric wires to the source of the electricity
-Learn to
line dance
-Spend two hours with a counsellor exploring your life
-Pick three trees of different species and spend an hour meditating
under each one
-Go on a week-long solo journey by bus, bike, or foot
to a place you've never been; listen to the people you meet
-Learn
how to build a wall
-Fall in love
-Take a bicycle to pieces and put
it together again
-Visit a Native American reservation and talk with
the people you meet about their past and future
-Learn how to give a
good massage
-Spend a day watching a state or provincial legislature
at work
-Calculate how much carbon dioxide your family is adding to
the atmosphere each year
-Ask a good friend to share the most
important lessons he or she has learned about sex and how to make love
-Perform menial or repetitive work at a job that lasts at least a
week
-Read primary sources on history, science, social science (that
is, avoid the authors who are interpreting the work of others)
-Carry
all your trash around with you for a week. At the end of the week,
weigh it all
-Write an episode of one of the current top-rated
sitcoms on commercial TV; explain the story line to a friend
-Repair
a damaged relationship
-Start that band/garden/book/art movement you
told yourself you'd always do
-Throw the biggest party you can; try
to get someone from every decade dancing
-Ask your parents about
their relationship
-Refuse to do meaningless work for one week
-Offer to help your child's teacher
-Admit that you don't know and ask
for help
-Tell people how you are really doing
-Go to a punk rock
or hip-hop show
-Sell your car and go to India
-Seek out a friend
of a different race & class
-Ask people what they are planning to
do about the year 2000 computer bug
-Calculate the total miles
traveled from the towns labeled on food cans in your pantry
-Ask a
kid about divorce
-Teach yourself to play guitar
-Go to the
industrial section of town and see how much free stuff is available (go
dumpster diving)
-Make a movie about your neighborhood
-Visit the
nearest creek once a week for a month and notice changes along the
banks, in the water flows, in the pools
-Collect dumpling recipes
from around the world; throw a dumpling party
-Imagine yourself
looking back on your life at 90 years of age: what are the highlights?
Who has been most important? What do you wish you had done? Now go out
and do those things, thank those people and live those highlights.
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