Tonight, I hit a wall. I haven’t been this tired and this out of it in a long time. It’s been a crazy few days with work and caring for a wild little creature, and it seems I haven’t out much thought into purposeful time for myself. When I don’t have that, I tend to burn out quick. That said, I want to stay on track - I’m over halfway towards my goal and I have no plans of stopping. With my mind foggy, I’m going to keep this Sunday’s segments light and easy.
Forget All & Remember One
Forget All
An interesting thing happens when I get tired and I try to come up with things to write. Most of the time my mind just stays blank, refusing to catch on to anything at all. Often times, that refusal is accompanied by a feeling a futility, but not in a negative way. It’s hard to explain, but I think there’s some truth in it.
I can write something profound. I can watch videos made by smart people and read books by even smarter people. I can accumulate and disseminate as much information as I possibly can in my life, but at the end of the day it’s all kind of…unnecessary. I’m not going to say meaningless - unnecessary is more fitting.
It’s fun to learn new things. Sometimes, learning new things is precisely what brings us out of dark places (a la me). The only issue is that knowledge, much like pleasure, is a never ending wheel. As long as we seek it, we’ll always want more. Most of my days are filled with knowledge - either consuming it or producing it - as if I was aiming toward some great moment when I (and we) finally “get” it.
The truth is, I’m never going to get it. There’s no finish line, there’s no final ecstasy. Despite popular opinion, knowledge does not make a man better than his peers. The more I go along this path and the more great thinkers I come across, I see this notion repeated often. It’s kind of ironic coming from thinkers who produced tomes of thought and literature, but it rings true nonetheless. It’s hard for me to access this viewpoint when I’m awake and alert and beaming with life. It’s only in the decline, in the sleepy hours of the night does this truth sing out to me.
We live in an age obsessed with things, and that includes knowledge. Just look at the internet - people think they know everything about everything, and they do it quite convincingly. Whether its fitness gurus or financial experts, there’s no shortage of people who want the world to know how much they “know”. The same is true for philosophies, worldviews, metaphysics - pretty much anything and everything.
I don’t intend to out anyone down, nor disparage anyone. It’s more of a general vibe or feeling. It’s an overwhelming feeling of surrender. The truth is, we don’t know anything. We don’t know for certain how we got here or why. Sure, we think we know a lot of things, but in the grand scale of life these things we cling to are often temporal and petty. It’s not that there’s no point to learning new things, it’s just that it doesn’t have to be so serious. Our egos think the knowledge we obtain makes us who we are, but I don’t believe that to be true. I don’t think a genius has any more inherent worth than a…not-genius. The scale of everything is so incomprehensibly large that our egos and ur knowledge pales in comparison.
I’m halfway through my journey, and I’m starting to realize a significant shift. I started this by wanting to consume all information I possibly could. Now, my desires lean towards learning to forget all the things I once knew. As long as I cling to my intellect and my “unbelievable, remarkable, unique” mind (that’s a joke), the more I suffer. I’ve said things similar to this before, but now I’m really starting to feel it.
Remember One
There’s only one thing to remember:
It’s going to be okay.
I don’t mean that in a wishy-washy, rah-rah type of way. I say it in dead seriousness (or, in Gen-Z speak, “dead-ass”). No matter what it is - trials ahead, insufferable loss or the very prospect of your own morality, it’s going to be okay. If you’re sick, weak, hurt, anxious, afraid or not where you thought you’d be in life, it’s going to be okay. I believe that that phrase is the fundamental ethos of our reality. It’s also the distilled message of Christ if you look at it in the proper light. I can’t give you numbers or figures or lofty arguments, I just know.
That’s all there is to it.