No one person can possibly know “all the things” there are to know. No one person can even know all the things that have accumulated in the body of documented human knowledge – it’s just too much for one person to hold onto within the confines of a single mind, and one lifetime. We’re born knowing basically nothing, and with a characteristic curiosity that leads us to quickly begin learning, and continue (if we don’t halt the process) throughout our lives. Some people eagerly embrace learning, and consume new knowledge from a variety of sources. Some people have to be prodded into learning, once some basics are learned that get them by in life. Some people furiously resist new knowledge, if there’s any chance it may unsettle what they already think they know. We’re interesting creatures, and there’s quite a bit of variation in our interest in knowledge, what we’re capable of learning, and what we choose to care about.
Life is very much an open book test, after a fashion. We each have the chance to address our own ignorance live, in real-time, through an almost ludicrous assortment of means and resources. Don’t know the answer to some question? Don’t have a solution to some problem? More than ever the fix could be as simple as “looking it up” – somewhere – or asking someone who knows (or thinks they do). What an incredible luxury to have so much stored knowledge available more or less on demand.
…Remember encyclopedias? I remember…
…Remember vast shelves of hardbound books with fine print, spanning floor-to-ceiling, row after row, almost having a visible “vanishing point” or horizon in huge elegant libraries populated with quiet folks, head-down, reading things? (They still exist… when was the last time you went to a library?) I used to go to the library all the time…
I’m sipping my coffee thinking about libraries, books, and knowledge, and all the many resources that exist for answering unanswered questions. I’m thinking about “lifelong learning” and the power of learning to “keep us young” (cognitively). It’s only just now daybreak, and the sunrise is still in the future by some small amount. Another sip of my coffee, and I find myself considering how easily an encyclopedia becomes “out of date” compared to the living body of knowledge stored on servers, on “the cloud”, and archived digitally. There was a time when a good encyclopedia was about as “state of the art” as stored knowledge got – compressed into smaller pieces, widely available as resource in most any library, it was where so many of us found information on some topic, person, or place when we needed it.
Now? Just “google it”… “Google” even became a verb for that activity of searching for something using a search engine online. LOL In spite of how much knowledge is so easily available, somehow we still haven’t eliminated misinformation, nor have we “learned all there is to know”, nor have we even mastered who and what we are as creatures, nor fully understood the world we live in. Wild. All that knowledge and we’re still ignorant primates muddling along adding to our available knowledge without being able to consume it all.
…I sit with my coffee and my thoughts, watching the sky slowly shift from darkness to shades of gray with a hint of blue, to something bluer and less gray, as the clock ticks away the moments until the sun rises…
After talking over my self-care needs and “where I’m at” with my Traveling Partner, I planned some downtime and reserved a room on the coast at a favorite (and inexpensive) spot with good views and easy beach access. It’ll be good to get some quiet time for myself listening to the wind and the waves, and watching the tide come and go – and only a week away! 😀 I’m getting better at this self-care thing…
I watch the traffic on the streets below making the trip around the park block below the office window. It’s rather like some peculiar merry-go-round of commuter traffic as cars turn left on these one-way streets, looking for a choice parking spot. The street car also goes around this block, as it doubles-back to return the way it came, but a block over. Humans being human, in the machines they’ve created. I finish my coffee, contemplating what it means to be human in this moment. I guess it’s a good one to begin again…
Evening Light 