How do you spell freedom?
Classic cars (and wooden boats) are a great means to finding out what being carefree is all about... we mean tied down with expensive responsibilities and disappointment.
Seriously, they’re both fascinating and frustrating and fabulous lifestyles–there’s always something wrong, and broken, leaking, fubar, and ugly… but when you ride around in the dream-machine, on land or sea, that you’ve restored or built with your own two lunchhooks and sweat, on a sweet sunny day, emitting envious desire and smiles with the wind in your hair, all of life’s problems either seem laughable or a piece of cake.
You've got to hand it to the Greeks.
"As it turned out, Ionia, between 600 - 400 BC was the place where science was born. The key to this great revolution in thought was the hand.
Some of the brilliant Ionian thinkers were the sons of sailors and farmers and weavers. They were accustomed to poking and fixing, unlike the priests and scribes of other nations, who, raised in luxury, were reluctant to dirty their hands.
They rejected superstition, and they worked wonders."
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Read all about Democritus, The Laughing Philosopher, and how he discovered the "atom" and changed the world forever here.
"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."
- Mark Twain
Lotta life lessons underneath the hood.
The traditional skills side of the education will start with an introduction to hand tools and the joys of mindful manual labor, i.e. the effort-driven reward cycle, epicentered in the hypothalamus, and then progress to specialty machinery operation and maintenance. Shop etiquette, respect for nature, and physics, chemistry, and biology will also figure in. And then the life-long journey to mastering craftsmanship.
We'll also literally break bread together every day: lunch will be planned, prepared, eaten, and cleaned up by all of us, with simple mindfulness and gratitude.
The endgame for all students is to wrench a car (or motorcycle) back to life, or build a boat, and drive or sail it away on graduation day.
But the sky's the limit here, and so we encourage our Wiseacres to let their imagination run wild: How about throwing a brand-new electric motor into a clutch-less 1969 Karmann Ghia autostick convertible as a crazy-cool attempt at mixing mechanical metaphors, so-to-speak?
Dare to be different.
In the meantime everyone will also learn to brew beer, plant a garden, keep bees, raise chickens, hunt/fish, weld, and even run a small business, in the spirit of the often unfairly maligned (as an egotistical sybarite) Epicurus and his famous monastic, communal philosophy that's the perfect antidote to today's shouty, disconnected noise and social-distancing alienation.
Guest lecturers, field trips, and special seminars will add tang and depth to the curriculum.
