Still Learning

Still Learning

May 11, 2026

At age 87, Michelangelo was still at work. He had spent the previous sixteen years as chief architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, asking important questions and solving challenging problems. In those final years of his life, he is said to have written two words: Ancora imparo. I am still learning. 

This phrase has endured for five centuries because it captures something we recognize: the relentlessness of a person who has spent a lifetime looking closely at the world and still believes there is more to see. 

Most of us will never carve marble or paint a chapel ceiling. But all of us face the same choice Michelangelo named. Do we keep learning — or decide we know enough? 

There are understandable reasons to stop. The sheer volume of what we don’t know can feel paralyzing. Right now, nearly 120 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes worldwide. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, families have been fleeing armed conflict for three decades, a crisis so protracted it barely registers in American headlines. In Bangladesh, over a million Rohingya refugees live in camps built as temporary shelters nearly nine years ago. Closer to home, more than 16% of Idaho children don’t have enough to eat.

No one person can hold all of this at once. The temptation is to narrow the frame. To pay attention only to what is familiar, what we already understand. This instinct is reasonable. Our attention is finite, and we have to make choices about where to look. 

But narrowing the frame is one thing. Closing our eyes is another. People who remain unseen tend to stay that way. Their suffering gets absorbed into policy abstractions, and the human reality underneath those numbers disappears. Not because it was hidden, but because few people get close enough to ask specific questions about specific lives. 

That pattern holds until someone decides to get curious. 

In 1892, a young journalist in Memphis named Ida B. Wells lost three friends to a lynching. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart ran a store called People’s Grocery. It was doing well, drawing customers from a nearby white-owned competitor. After a confrontation in which the men defended their store, they were arrested and jailed. A mob of seventy-five people stormed the jail, dragged them to a rail yard, and shot them to death. 

In the wake of these murders, Wells started asking questions and looking for answers. She collected accounts of lynchings from white newspapers across the South. She logged the names of the dead, the dates, the locations, the charges. Then she checked the charges against the facts. In case after case, the justification fell apart. Men had been lynched for arguing with a white employer. For being too successful. For being in the wrong place. For no recorded reason at all. The data did not reveal crime and punishment. It showed a pattern of terror: systematic violence used to enforce racial and economic control.

Wells published what she learned in a pamphlet called Southern Horrors. She laid out the numbers. She named names. She printed the evidence. The backlash was swift, but she kept investigating and publishing. Wells forced an international audience to confront what had been happening in plain sight for decades. 

None of the facts Wells uncovered were secret. Lynchings were public events: photographed, announced in local papers, sometimes treated as spectacle. The information existed. What had been missing was someone willing to gather it, organize it, and say plainly what it meant. Wells did not discover hidden evidence. She just refused to look away. 

Wells was a reporter. Most of us are not. But the question she asked — What is happening? — does not demand a press pass or a set of professional skills. It requires a willingness to admit that there are stories out there that we need to learn more about.

A neighbor reads about people experiencing food insecurity in her community and, instead of stopping at the headline, looks up what local food pantries need. A teacher notices that certain students rarely speak in class and asks them why — and then changes how she teaches. A man picks up a memoir by someone who lives halfway across the world and then begins to question his government’s international responsibilities. These are not dramatic acts. They are choices to keep learning when it would be easier to look away.

Each one begins with curiosity — because before we can act, we have to see, and before we can see, we have to accept that what we already know is not enough. We talk often about the importance of taking action — showing up, speaking out, making a difference. But action without understanding is just motion. It can be well-intentioned and still miss the mark, still center the wrong voices, still solve the wrong problem. Curiosity is what keeps action honest.

This is why Stay Curious is one of the Wassmuth Powerful Practices. It is not a suggestion to be more open-minded in the abstract. It is a commitment to keep asking questions, especially when the answers are uncomfortable, when the stories are unfamiliar, when it would be easier to look away.

Wells started with a question about three men she knew. But her curiosity didn’t stop there — it carried her into the stories of hundreds of people she had never met. We do not need her courage or her platform to do what she did. We just need to keep asking. Keep learning. 

Ancora imparo. At 87, at any age.