A few months ago, I watched through several hours of an EdX course on the weather.
The weather has fascinated me for years now—so much so that I've read through an entire college-level weather textbook twice, not to mention countless other books on the topic.
But I still felt that understanding of the topic eluded me.
The EdX course pointed out what was, perhaps obviously, missing from my self-directed learning course.
To understand the weather, you need to pay attention to the weather.
You need to observe temperature, humidity, pressure, clouds, wind, and wind aloft. Do this often enough for long enough and the patterns of local weather will make themselves apparent. It seemed, if with slightly less obvious results, like my quest to learn the names of trees in my neighborhood.
I took down my weather observations multiple times per day with some consistency for more than a month.
And then, of course, I stopped.
Why stop? Probably a busy day where I simply forgot.
Or, worse, a day where the weather seemed rote. Blue skies, warm and dry. What was there to note really? A day like many previous days.
But if you don't look, then you won't see.
Or—break a daily habit one day, it will be harder to pick back up.
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