the more i learn
the less i know
this week’s Thought (singular)
no thoughts, only immense heartbreak at losing yet another scrunchie. when will this horror end. is no scrunchie safe?
a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they have a very ripe orange. thank you for joining us. may you indulge in the slow but satisfying process of peeling and separating the orange segments and have zero stickiness from the rinds on your fingers at the end of it.
a very warm welcome to old readers as well. may good sense continue to prevail.
hi
roughly a year ago, i had written this piece about birthdays.
with all the wisdom of a recent 22-year-old, i had proclaimed the ‘…four temporal categories - Pureness, childhood, The Sadness Years, and enlightenment.’ i, of course, as a 22-year-old, had already reached the enlightenment phase. i am pleased to announce that we’re re-opening that discussion, since as a recent 23-year-old, i have even more wisdom on the subject.
this is what i know now -
i know nothing,
i am nowhere close to enlightenment, and
jahnavi-from-a-year-ago was equal parts dramatic and stupid. always a dangerous combination.
in fact, the more i learn, the less i seem to know! i am mentally oscillating between going ahead and putting myself in the The Sadness Years category v/s giving up the futile idea of temporal categorisation as a whole. perhaps i shouldn’t be using concepts devised by jahnavi-from-a-year-ago, since we’ve established that she knew less than jahnavi-from-the-present, who knows nothing.
i think recognising that i know nothing is a pretty good indication that i know something more than i did back when i thought i actually knew something. i know that there is so much more to know. i know that enlightenment is a lofty goal for somebody who barely manages to put out her weekly newsletter on schedule. i know that i am so young, and that i have so much time left to learn more and know less.
i feel terribly attached to the idea of feeling younger now than i did last year, simply because the world has opened so much wider and i have, in perspective, grown so much smaller. it’s like those solar system videos, where they show the moon revolving around the comparatively larger earth, only to promptly zoom out and show everything in the solar system revolving around the sun. sweet and naïve 22-year-old jahnavi thought she knew all there is to know. she hadn’t noticed the sun.
i have gone one step further. not only have i realised that there is a flaming ball of gas that i live in the vicinity of, i have also realised that the sun is just one out of several billion stars in one out of several billion galaxies. and this realisation has contributed to my belief that i know absolutely nothing, and my sneaking suspicion that the things that i thought i knew when it was just me and my good friends, the earth and the moon, are possibly rubbish.
this is not hopeless. on the contrary, i’m delighted. it’s like Rilke says -
Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
such a large universe, and so many things to know, and no pressure to know them immediately because i can barely hold a single sun in the palm of my hand without burning myself yet.
notice how i said something along the lines of growing smaller above. i find it paradoxical that the smaller you recognise you are, the more you realise there is to learn. or the other way around. it’s a cause and effect thing, and i’m not sure which is which.
that’s all i really have for you today. i’ll let you know once i’ve realised that i’m living my way to an answer. any answer at all.
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this week’s Song
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thank you for reading, and see you next week <3
The Dunning-Kruger effect :D