wonder
Learning has become the quiet rhythm of my life. For years, I have wandered through different faculties at the University of Vienna like a well‑meaning academic nomad, collecting syllabi the way other people collect fridge magnets. And in the spaces between those wanderings, the same gentle pull kept tugging at me: the desire to understand a little more of the world each day. My hopes, my plans, even my sense of purpose orbit around studying, teaching, and sharing ideas—essentially, I am building my personality around being a professional nerd.
And yet the person who taught me the most essential things was not a scholar. He could not read a single word. My greatest teacher was my grandfather—an illiterate farmer whose understanding of life ran deeper than anything I have found in books or lecture halls. His wisdom was not polished. It came from seasons and soil, from weather and work, from the quiet observation of people and the patience required to respect them. He was, in short, the kind of man who could predict rain by sniffing the air, while I still need three apps and a satellite image.
The lesson he left me with is simple, almost disarming: No matter how much I refine my mind, I will always remain a beginner before the vastness of what there is to know. A lifetime of learning brings us only to the shoreline of understanding, where the ocean of the unknown stretches endlessly beyond. He taught me not to fear that ocean. Not to pretend I have mastered it. Instead, he showed me how to welcome it—to see ignorance not as a flaw, but as the natural state of anyone who is genuinely curious. To stand at the edge of what I do not know and feel not shame, but wonder. (And occasionally mild panic.)
What I remember most vividly is his freedom from the need to impress. He moved through the world without the armor of pretense. Perhaps I was the only exception—his only and deeply loved granddaughter, the only person for whom he made pancakes, terrible as they were. These pancakes were culinary crimes. They defied physics. They could have been used as construction material. But he made them with such pride that I ate them with the solemnity of someone participating in a sacred ritual. It was one of the rare moments when he tried to impress anyone at all. And even then, he laughed at himself, speaking openly about his lack of cooking skills, never trying to decorate himself with false confidence. His honesty about his limits was not shame; it was clarity. And that clarity gave him a quiet dignity no education could have improved.
I admired him deeply, and I have spent much of my life trying to carry pieces of his character into my own. When I stand in front of students, I never assume that my knowledge outweighs theirs. I may understand certain topics more thoroughly—especially when I have prepared with care—but they bring experiences I have never lived. They carry talents I do not possess, perspectives I could not invent, and ways of seeing the world that widen my own. Their questions often reveal angles I had not considered; their insights remind me that learning is not a ladder but a landscape. A landscape in which I am sometimes the guide, sometimes the lost tourist, and occasionally the person who forgot the map at home.
Teaching, then, feels less like standing above someone and more like standing beside them. It is a shared space, a meeting of minds rather than a hierarchy of them. And in that space, my grandfather’s lesson continues to echo: Wisdom is not a hierarchy. It is a conversation. It is a willingness to remain open, porous, unfinished.
Every March, I feel my grandfather more intensely. He was born in March and died in March, as if his life had quietly completed a circle. The month carries a strange tenderness for me—a mixture of beginnings and endings, of memory and renewal. I often wonder whether he would be pleased with me today. Whether he would recognize himself in the way I try to move through the world. And I feel a soft sadness knowing he cannot see how present he remains in my life—how much of him lives in the way I learn, the way I teach, and the way I try to meet the world with humility.
He could not read, but he taught me how to understand. He could not write, but he shaped the story of who I am becoming — a story far fluffier than his pancakes ever were.
