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| Thursday, November 8, 2012 11:46 AM |
| Knowing |
 by Fëanor |
Often Griffin will see something and ask me (or poppy, or my parents), "What's that?" And very often when he is given the answer ("Oh, that's X."), he will either insist that it's wrong, and that he has a better answer ("No, not X, Y!"), or intimate that he knew the answer all along ("Yeah, X.").
Probably I'm getting a little too philosophical and pretentious here (I considered not posting this at all; I'm afraid it's a bit corny), but this has got me thinking about how early in life we decide we know everything, and how long it takes us to realize (if we ever realize it at all) how wrong we are. Maybe we can't ever fully understand how little we know, and how little we can ever know, because it would fill us too much with existential dread. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance around the recognition of our own ignorance - knowing that we don't know. We have to believe that we have a good working knowledge of the universe in order to keep moving through it and not just give up entirely. That being said, I think it's definitely useful to stop every once in a while and remind yourself just how much you've learned, and how much there is still to learn, and that you can't ever stop.
I'm not going to burst the guy's bubble any time soon, though. In twenty years or so he'll figure this all out for himself. I just hope it doesn't come with a lot of existential dread, because that stuff sucks. |
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