"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the
learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that
no longer exists."
-Eric Hoffer
It’s funny,
because the more I learn, the more I realize that there’s this whole
expanse of…unlearned. For some reason I picture all that I know as this
mist obscuring all that I still do not know. It’s like some sort of
arrogance everyone has to defeat in order to progress, a haze to be
overcome. I don’t know, I think this quote makes a lot of sense because
knowledge isn’t this static commodity like it’s seen. It’s not a PhD or
a Nobel Prize. It’s barely a nuance, if even… a moment, but it expires
within a second if it does not give new life. It is as if knowledge’s
only fate is to bring forth greater knowledge, and if it does not
realize this providence, it is nothing. It needs to evolve. The learned
are left in this oasis where their knowledge remains untouchable unless
it continues to forge across this desert. It’s like an infinite
proportion, the oasis to the desert. The learners realize that it will
become inversely infinite and that this oasis just keeps getting
smaller within this context, but they keep learning, realizing every
grain of sand holds this epic within it, but that they will hear but a
handful of these relations in their time, and they are content.
But
sometimes people feel they’ve learned enough, and this is when their
knowledge dies. Their knowledge is of something that merely exists in
their delusion, a world that passed by them split second ago, a world
that will never resurface. Some days, when I find myself just lost in
books, absorbing all of these thoughts, it just baffles me that I know
so little. I feel almost frantic, like I’m grasping onto all these
notions that are escaping me, barely missing me, diminishing before I
can grab on. Because they’re at my fingertips, the tip of my tongue,
this scent is still in the air. The words, the colours, the ideas so
narrowly escaped, it’s as if they laugh and mock me, but I remind
myself to be a good sport. They’re so impossibly close to me and yet I
still do not know them, like a beautiful stranger that passes you on
the street. You can’t just stop them in their tracks and know them the n
and there, but you rely on fate to bring them back across your path if
Allah wills them to be there. And it’s the same with these evasive
enigmas of knowing…they escape me before I see them there. And yet my
mission is to keep chasing them, to pursue them across the farthest
deserts and the most bitter oceans—that is the call of a learner. But
the wiser I get, the more I realize that these are only fragments.
Knowledge cannot be stationed where it is.
just reading on the lake...
Sometimes
the wisest thing is to admit that you will never attain this knowledge,
you will never hold it down to where you can always glance at it and
feel secure. Accept that it is always running away. It makes life
simpler. In this sense, ignorance is not the lack of knowledge, but the
captivity of it. The state in which knowledge is immobile, unbendable,
where it can no longer expand. You cannot punctuate wisdom. It grows,
it maneuvers its ways around time, forces, the music that’s just there.
In between notes. How can you confine it? Confine it to your time, your
world, your values, your place, your understanding? Your understanding
is limited, you cannot hold something unlimited as a prisoner within
it. Allow it to exceed you. Knowledge in and of itself has to be
transcendent. You cannot confine it. I think a lot of the stupidity
that happens in this world is when people take knowledge and attempt to
contain it, isolate it, put it in some sterile environment. To say that
this is absolutely true on its own, regardless of the milieu, is
foolish. You cannot disregard the framework. It is the framework. The
thing to be realized is that nothing can exist in a vacuum. Like Chuck
Klosterman says in his book, nothing is “in and of itself.” It cannot
be.
Anyway, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say. I just
read that quote and thought wow…that is so true. Once you’ve become
“learned” your knowledge becomes extinct. Once it is accomplished, its
life is over. And the lifeless cannot accomplish any more missions.
Okay so what I’m trying to say is…don’t let your knowledge die at the
hands of masquerading arrogance. This is the time of chance, it always
is. Inherit the earth and learn and let it live :)
Love always,
Emaaaan
