Living in ignorance
I know that you’re supposed to get the ball over the line. That’s about it. (Provincial Archives of Alberta)
When I was a child, certain things were mysterious and unknowable.
I didn’t mind it — to me, it was part of being a kid. Adults did stuff and you didn’t know why. If you didn’t know what a slang term meant, you had to (shudder) ask someone.
There was no Google back then, so you had to get information from books. And there was plenty of information that wasn’t available in books, and wasn’t searchable through a card catalog even if it had been. In my small town, the vast majority of books weren’t easily accessible anyway. It seems unfathomable now, even though that’s how I spent my entire childhood.
If you wanted to know who sang a song, you had to wait for the radio announcer to tell you; until that happened, you’d be out of luck. (Unless you had a friend who subsequently introduced you to Led Zeppelin and you’d discover that the “Stairway to Heaven” guys were responsible for a bunch of the ones you liked.)
Anyway, every so often I come across something that lingers from childhood that I still don’t know about and haven’t realized that I could now google. A partial list:
What poison ivy looks like
What the heck the sostenuto pedal does
The appendix and other weird parts of the body
What “Je me souviens” means on Quebec license plates
Dog breeds
Why people think that getting cold or wet makes you sick, and am I missing something here
I have collected this list, with some amusement, over a period of time during which I began to look for some of these gaps in my knowledge — the things I’ve always wondered about, yet still don’t know. Such missing pieces are hard to find now that Google is a constant companion and I can seek out the answers to my questions so easily.
Interestingly, however, many of the adolescents I’ve worked with over the years do not have this trait. They can investigate anything: they can learn who sings what song with the tap of an app; they can find the meaning of words they don’t know; they can instantly pull up a picture of any kind of tree or flower to see what it looks like.
But despite the fact that they have grown up with the Internet — or perhaps because of that fact — these kids are indifferent to the fount of knowledge accessible via the tiny computers in their pockets. Like all teenagers (and really, like all of us), they care about what they care about and they’re focused on that. Unfamiliar words in a book they didn’t want to read in the first place aren’t worth the effort to look up, even if that effort is a fraction of what it would have been in the olden days of the twentieth century.
When you know that you could find the answer to virtually any question very quickly at any time, maybe you don’t need to actually do it. Meanwhile, the sheer volume and pace of information coming at us these days is so overwhelming that we might long for the peace and quiet of knowing and seeing less, on purpose. We can specialize by going deep instead of broad in our knowledge, we can focus on the people around us and their stories, or we can retreat into our own creativity and pursue an artistic vision that is protected from outside influence. I know kids (and adults) on each of these paths, and I have come to understand that all are valid options.
I see myself as a curious person — as you might imagine, I was a really nerdy kid — but even I have a limit. I haven’t read much nonfiction this year. I still can’t explain how an engine works, despite having a father who has always been eager to teach me. And there a lot of other things that I might benefit from learning about that I just can’t get into (for instance, global financial system).
So even though it drives me a bit crazy as a teacher when a kid tries to do the work without reading directions (a time savings of thirty-five seconds that ends up costing them an hour) or has no interest in building their vocabulary or their understanding of world history, I can empathize. I’m in the fortunate position of getting to choose what I want to pay attention to and invest in, and I can’t blame them for doing the same.
I just looked up what the sostenuto pedal is for. It sustains only the notes that were ringing before the pedal was pressed down. I guess I had kind of figured that out already. Disappointingly, my life isn’t transformed, and probably neither is yours. So I guess we can all go on and investigate the things we’re passionate about and chase the adventures we want to have. That’s how we will grow, and how our lives will ultimately transform.
There’s always the possibility that we can, every so often, lift the veil that shrouds us from seeing things that would challenge us, expand our capacity, and help us to make a greater contribution to the world. But even if we spent all of our time in that state of knowledge-seeking, there will always be that which is mysterious and unknowable. Might as well embrace living in ignorance, at least to some degree. Then, we can turn our attention to what we can accomplish with what we already know and understand. It never ends.
