What I know I don't know

"The more you know, the more you know you don't know". 

Aristotle

Yes indeed. The more I know, the more I know I don’t know. The more I read, the more I realise I have not yet read. But then, why do I persist in measuring my achievements – or rather, my lack of them – by what I manage to put inside my head? Surely it is what we do with such learning - or alternatively, our lack of it - that really counts.

Another quotation: The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them (authorship apparently uncertain). But if we don’t use our knowledge to save or to improve lives, then we have no more right to a sense of achievement than the neither the lazy nor the illiterate.

So from what I know I don’t know, to what I know I haven't done . . . My self-judgements tend to turn rather monotonously around what I have previously called the “tyranny of the everyday”: tasks that are never completed, or never remain so for very long. Washing, washing up, basic household cleanliness, accounts to be counted, bills to be paid, papers to be tidied. If I ever manage to achieve something vaguely long-term, such as sewing on a button, I feel like I deserve a medal. All so trivial, and so very, very boring, but if these chores remain undone life pretty soon becomes very difficult.

How does the average person move beyond this? Through measuring achievements in the workplace? A pay rise, a promotion, a bonus? A commendation from someone above in the hierarchy? The satisfaction of a job well done?

All this conveniently limits the time we have to consecrate to the most important goal I suppose we should really be trying to achieve – namely, being good parents, partners and friends. This delimits almost the entire sphere of influence that most of us can ever hope to have, and as such is our most significant contribution to the health and happiness of humanity. With my misplaced faith in the written word, I sometimes despise myself for not taking more time to read parenting books (or at least sufficiently re-read the ones I have already attempted, to allow me to action their very sound advice on such occasions as, say, when we are late for the school bus). And yet I also suspect that to agonise and intellectualise too deeply over such relationships could be a default recipe for failure.

There are some who have the opportunity to impact many more human lives, either by means of their innovative talents in culture, art, technology or human understanding, or simply by seeking celebrity for its own sake, and thus feeding the bizarre passion we seem to have for vicarious living. (These achievements rather often seem to be, so history and the internet tell us, at the expense of their own personal and/or family lives.) To successfully innovate, there are undoubtedly some that just struck it lucky, but most of the time the minimum requirement must be a rather thorough knowledge of all that has gone before. So now we’re back to where I started.

And so to the usual paradox. Instead of trying to rectify any of the above-mentioned failings, I am wasting time, energy (of all kinds) and yet more words.