Knowledge

If you've lived life as you should and misfortune hasn't visited you in any significant way, you should know more now than you have at any previous moment in your life. If you've been paying attention as you went, you should also feel the most ignorant.

As a child, we knew everything. Why does the grass grow? To soften our falls. Why does the cat eat off the floor? Because she wants to. Whatever it was, we had an explanation for it and we had no reason to believe that it was wrong or incomplete. Then, we got schooled.

In math, we learned about addition and subtraction. Maybe we even learned about multiplication and division. We plugged these additional facts into our minds and moved on, still confident in our complete knowledge.

Then, structured language was upon us. Grammar and spelling were added to our minds and we learned that a massive book contained a list of all the words known in our language. One way or another, we decided we weren't going to learn it all. Maybe we recognized that learning it all was an insurmountable task. Maybe we didn't care. However it happened, we had become aware of a gap in our knowledge.

Science widened the perception of that gap. The ridiculous number of formulas was more than any of us wanted to shove into our brains. All the complexities of how the sciences interacted was more than we could think of. Furthermore, we had to realize that there were things nobody knew. In order for us to know them, we'd have to wait for someone to figure them out or discover them for ourselves.

Then we got to the infinite timeline of history. The uncountable number of places and events that had existed during all the years that came before us. Worse, even than undiscovered science, was that some of these facts had been lost forever. There were things that no one would ever know, least of all us. And so, the gap widened further.

If you took an interest in knowledge, you may have branched into a more specific field: Philosophy, computer science, psychology, chemistry, or any number of other possibilities. Each new fact you learned raised one or more new questions. As you built your mountain of knowledge you could see more and more of the land you hadn't covered yet.

While it is theoretically possible that a body of knowledge could exist that encompassed "all" of it, it could never be accumulated in the lifespan of a single human being. So, for the entirety of our lives, we must accept that for everything we learn, we will also learn of one or more things that we don't know. Every day, we will discover that we are even more ignorant than we previously thought.

There is an upside to this. An unobtainable amount of knowledge leaves infinite room for expansion. No matter how tall you make your mountain, you can always make it taller. Think about how much you know now and how powerful you are as a result of that knowledge. Now, imagine being twice as powerful and knowing that the potential exists to become even more powerful. That is the reality you face, given that you have have the life left to realize it. For every day you live, you have another opportunity to manifest this destiny. You will always have room to grow. You will always have more to learn.