I have probably uttered a variation on this sentence a million times in all my years, and it stresses me out! I, like many others, like to know things that I am supposed to know, and to know them when I am supposed to know them. I fear being left behind. I yearn for the knowledge that I am on track, that I am where I am supposed to be and doing well. I think in this anxious scrapping for knowledge that we feel we should have, we miss all the fun in getting there. When we anguish in the not knowing of something, we forget all the doors open to us by not knowing, all the doors we get to open and test in the figuring out of things.
I think a trap a lot of people fall into, including myself, is imagining that there is a set type of things we are supposed to understand at certain points in our life. We imagine each section of our lives as a vessel that is to be filled up before we can move on to the next part. High school, for example, is one such vessel. It seems like a place where we are supposed to learn enough from our classes to survive on college and move on. But when we imagine things this way we limit ourselves to the endless possibilities of our own wandering minds. We should feel free to imagine beyond what is expected, to be hungry for more than what is needed, to be comfortable having not figured something out yet. We must find the value in the journey to figuring something out instead of all that we place in having the answer. It is in the journey where we find out what interests us and examine those things and take as many detours as we can to fill ourselves with more than we thought necessary. I know this is something I have to work on. I have to relax when I don't have all the answers because looking for them is what makes us fully developed people, people who have looked at things from all angles and have real, valuable opinions about the world because we have taken the time to look around.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
How Do I Know What I Know?
As we grow up, we learn about a million ways to learn. We take in information in all of these different ways and have to learn, as we go, how to sort out what is useful and helpful and what is harmful to our growth. The fact is, however, that there is no set way of knowing what we know or learning new things. We know what we know through a huge combination of many different influences that all come together to teach us something. Even the simplest of things is the result of multiple "ways of knowing."
The example that comes to mind for me is baking chocolate chip cookies. This has been something that I have done since I was tall enough to reach the counter, something that I watched being done since before I can even remember. When I first started to learn how to make chocolate chip cookies, I was all about the recipe. A fairly cautious child, I checked and re-checked about a billion times to make sure I was getting the exact right amount of everything and doing everything in just the right order. But this technique did not serve to make the best cookies. I had to let the other aspect of learning take a little more control, the role of experience. I had seen these cookies made all my life, and so part of me knew what I was doing without trying. That part can be easily silenced by too much attention to detail, and it is important that we don't let that happen, because it is crucial to knowing what we know. Sometimes we just know it, and that's it. I knew to start with the butter and sugar even though it says to do that part separately, and to use a little more flour than suggested and a little less sugar. I knew how much salt to put in without measuring it out exactly simply by mimicking the motions I knew so well from my mother.
I think much of what we know is the same as this. Part of us needs to actively seek knowledge, but part of us needs to let it seep in naturally and not try to answer the question of how we know what we know because we can rest assured that we know it.
The example that comes to mind for me is baking chocolate chip cookies. This has been something that I have done since I was tall enough to reach the counter, something that I watched being done since before I can even remember. When I first started to learn how to make chocolate chip cookies, I was all about the recipe. A fairly cautious child, I checked and re-checked about a billion times to make sure I was getting the exact right amount of everything and doing everything in just the right order. But this technique did not serve to make the best cookies. I had to let the other aspect of learning take a little more control, the role of experience. I had seen these cookies made all my life, and so part of me knew what I was doing without trying. That part can be easily silenced by too much attention to detail, and it is important that we don't let that happen, because it is crucial to knowing what we know. Sometimes we just know it, and that's it. I knew to start with the butter and sugar even though it says to do that part separately, and to use a little more flour than suggested and a little less sugar. I knew how much salt to put in without measuring it out exactly simply by mimicking the motions I knew so well from my mother.
I think much of what we know is the same as this. Part of us needs to actively seek knowledge, but part of us needs to let it seep in naturally and not try to answer the question of how we know what we know because we can rest assured that we know it.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
The Garden State
In the last pages of Candide, the characters have finally reached their "Garden State," their place where they can all co-exist relatively happily. They have finally found their places in life and their roles in their world stretch out long into the future as they settle into what they have decided to do. In the end, their garden state is not such an extraordinary place. It is not the city of gold or the castle of Westphalia where nothing bad ever happens. They find what bliss they can in their small garden behind their modest home. They work the garden, every member of the household helping in the ways that they can.
I think this ending is demonstrating how Voltaire was right about the world, not Martin or Candide. Martin thought people had no free will and their world was governed by the wishes of the devil, forcing everyone to be miserable and do terrible things to each other. Candide and Pangloss had felt that everything that happened was for the best, no matter how many seemingly terrible things needed to happen to get to that point. While Pangloss still clings to this belief through the end of the book, I feel as though Candid has begun to truly rethink it. They end up in a situation that is neither terrible nor wonderful. They work hard and begin to live a fairly happy life. They are not being held as slaves or killing or hurting each other, and they are not living in a lavish castle, never knowing a worry or fear. They land somewhere in the middle, working hard for what they have and enjoying it the best they can. I think the last line shows Candide's transformation the most. Throughout the book, when terrible things have happened, Candide has started to doubt his philosophy but has always found a way to justify it in the end. In these last few lines, however, when Pangloss tells Candide that his theory has been right all along because without all the terrible things that happened they would not have ended up where they are now, Candide shrugs it off. "That's true enough," he says, "but we must go and work in the garden." He is not willing to agree wholeheartedly with Pangloss and relish in the joy they are now experiencing due to all the troubles they had to go through before, but he is also not firmly rejecting this theory and stewing in his own misery. He simply accepts what Pangloss has to say and presses forward in the modest life he has chosen of hard work and average happiness.
I think this ending is demonstrating how Voltaire was right about the world, not Martin or Candide. Martin thought people had no free will and their world was governed by the wishes of the devil, forcing everyone to be miserable and do terrible things to each other. Candide and Pangloss had felt that everything that happened was for the best, no matter how many seemingly terrible things needed to happen to get to that point. While Pangloss still clings to this belief through the end of the book, I feel as though Candid has begun to truly rethink it. They end up in a situation that is neither terrible nor wonderful. They work hard and begin to live a fairly happy life. They are not being held as slaves or killing or hurting each other, and they are not living in a lavish castle, never knowing a worry or fear. They land somewhere in the middle, working hard for what they have and enjoying it the best they can. I think the last line shows Candide's transformation the most. Throughout the book, when terrible things have happened, Candide has started to doubt his philosophy but has always found a way to justify it in the end. In these last few lines, however, when Pangloss tells Candide that his theory has been right all along because without all the terrible things that happened they would not have ended up where they are now, Candide shrugs it off. "That's true enough," he says, "but we must go and work in the garden." He is not willing to agree wholeheartedly with Pangloss and relish in the joy they are now experiencing due to all the troubles they had to go through before, but he is also not firmly rejecting this theory and stewing in his own misery. He simply accepts what Pangloss has to say and presses forward in the modest life he has chosen of hard work and average happiness.
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