KNOW WHAT I DON'T KNOW?...A LOT!

Funny thing but this morning I had to concede that the more I learn, the more I realize what I don't know! Innocently, or ignorantly, I thought that I had arrived at a rather telling stage of life and the self-confession brought with it a degree of concession and relief.

Come to find out, I am not the first to arrive at that conclusion and I'm in pretty good company too. Similar admissions have been attributed to Socrates and Albert Einstein.

Even more shockingly Donald Trump, in one of his notorious (and convoluted) Twitters a few years ago, wrote "The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know." Then he had to go and ruin it all by adding "...How can you possibly discover anything if you already know everything?"

But seriously, all this has led me to recognition of the wisdom paradox which tells us that the more we’re exposed to thoughts, points of view, new situations, cultures, ideas, and facts, the more we appreciate just how ignorant we are and that the ways to see the world are virtually infinite.

Don’t worry. There’s a payoff to that growing feeling of cluelessness.

There’s power hidden in it. That power rests in the lack of assumptions:

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn. We stop assuming there’s an easy answer.

-- We ask more questions.
-- We listen more intently to fully appreciate and understand a point of view.
-- We realize that anyone and everyone can be a teacher.
-- We tend to dismiss comparisons among individuals as irrelevant or at least of little use.
-- We’re comfortable exploring a fuzzy topic, knowing full well we might never get to the bottom of it.

And so, I will continue to accept my incompetence, my deficiencies, my ineptitude, knowing full well that, with every book I read, speech I hear, conversation I engage in, religion that I study, exposure to my own ignorance (even incomprehension) grows. The Catch 22, maybe even a blessing in disguise, is the fact that I tend to forget much of what I learn anymore, and the same applies to worrying about what I don't know.

I’ve learned to finally understand this level of awareness because it means that, just as a good thriller novel can, the curiosity that results will always make a dummy like me want to turn the page and come back for more.  

And, besides, it kind of feels good not having to pretend to know everything in a world of experts on everything imaginable...It removes a lot of  the pressure!