As the celebrated novelist Iris Murdoch noted, education in itself cannot make you happy. It can, however, allow you to become aware of your happiness. The link between living and learning is much stronger and more important than traditional education implies. Too often, children and adults alike will separate out in their minds, the learning process from their day-to-day lives. After all, a lot that is taught in schools, from the biology of insects, to the third person plural of a particular verb, seems unrelated to our world of television, dating, visiting the doctor, cleaning the home, etc. 

Yet the link between living and learning is vital to each process, and the two are mutually enriching. It is true enough that animal biology and verb grammar are not at the forefront of our minds each morning as we wake. But learning is often about discovery, something that often cannot be anticipated. Knowing even just a little about a lot can go a long way. Even in our daily lives. 

Though it is better understood in today's age how learning can help improve our lives, not enough has been said or written about how the strategies and experiences of our lives can also help our learning. This is the crux of Fluid Thinking. Each day or each week, we have to spot behavioural cues in our partner's or child's or friend's actions, we look at things from different angles, we attempt to tie one event as a consequence of another, we find patterns in, for example, weather systems, we use our imaginations to picture new or, as yet, unseen people, ideas or situations. 

And yet, we never take these examples of learning-in-process to the classroom, or training course. Too often it would seem, we have been taught to rely almost exclusively on textbooks and worksheets, in place of our natural tendencies for experiential, process learning. 

When we choose to bring down the artificial barriers that seem to distance the 'educational' from the everyday, we will find that the whole world is not merely a stage, to quote Shakespeare, but a classroom as well.