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.

If my 4-year-old had a mobile

This morning I had to leave my son at holiday day-care, screaming his head off.

He’s never been too keen on holiday club, for reasons he hasn’t been able to clearly express to us. This morning, he’d grumbled a bit on leaving home, but then seemed to be making a real effort to put a brave face on it, saying ‘don’t worry, I’ll be fine’ to his obviously deeply- concerned baby sister, and even yelling “yay!’ as we pulled into the car park. But as we entered the building, something changed. His face grew serious, then crumpled, then as I moved to go he simply dissolved into tears.

Anything I said only made him worse, so in the end I was obliged to leave him assaulting the ears of the long-suffering, council-employed teenage baby-sitters, and scurry away to leave my daughter with the nanny, then scurry even faster to get to work on time.

On the tram I wrestled with my demons, tears in my own eyes. I called my husband, who really didn’t appreciate me trying to off-load some of the emotional guilt in his direction: his take on the situation was along the lines of ‘life’s not all good, he’s got to learn to take the rough with the smooth’, and even better, ‘he must have been picking up negative vibes from you.’ No consolation there then.

So what to do? I felt as if I had to take action somehow. I finally realised that my reflex was to try to use that verbo-emotional sticking plaster of the digital age: the text message. I wanted to text my son, to say everything would be okay, chin up, mummy was thinking about him, mummy would come to get him as soon as she possibly could. As I sometimes do with my husband, sending him little “courage, I love you” messages full of xxs if I know he a tough day ahead, or just to briefly alleviate the boredom of commuting. A little good deed done, or a bad one undone, and so easily. A little text would alleviate my guilt and make everything okay.

I realise that even once my son is old enough to read, and old enough to have a phone of his own (heaven forbid), such messages would be of dubious benefit. Emotional sound-bites from a stressed-out mummy would not, I suspect, do much more than add guilt and anxiety to his side of the equation. Then, as now, would it really help him if I try to explain that mummy simply has to work, and that my holidays are a week shorter than his? Would it help if I tried to explain that we made choices? That we decided we needed a house that was big enough for him and his sister to have their own bedrooms, with a little bit of garden for him to expend his copious amounts of energy, to run and shout without disturbing the neighbours, far enough away from the city to allow him fresh air and garden fruit, and necessitate use of at least one car on a daily basis? Would it be possible to explain that, even if we did live in a tiny 2-bed suburban flat, and avoid absolutely all unnecessary expenses, both mummy and daddy would probably still have to work to make ends meet, including some of the school holidays?

It is not a problem with “collectivity”, as the holiday club director will no doubt try to tell me next time she sees me. My son is not nervous or anti-social, he is always asking to invite friends around or self-invite himself to theirs, and it is extremely rare that he objects to going to school. At present I count myself lucky that I am not one of those parents having to leave their children screaming and protesting at school 5 days a week, 30-plus weeks a year. Perhaps these parents are also feeling guilty because they have no choice, or guilty because they do have a choice as school is not in fact compulsory until the age of 6. But would we be doing our kids any favours if we kept them in the protected, parent-focused home environment for as long as absolutely possible?

My mother didn’t work, from my birth until I was at university. She stayed at home to raise the kids, a luxury afforded by the nature of my father’s employment (in a scientific domain), and by a carefully managed family budget (I remember going years without a holiday, for example). We were lucky, I know. This maternal presence meant I could read before I went to school, there were never logistical problems with childcare, and I always felt extremely well-supported at every step of my education. However, as an adult, I sometimes wonder if the results were exclusively positive. I rather doubt that I can be defined as more well-adjusted and ready to face the world than any of my peers whose mothers worked. Are maternal sacrifice and parental pressure more formative paradigms than maternal multi-tasking and somewhat blended childcare arrangements? And can me taking time out of both work and childcare to blog about this issue possibly gain anything other than the creation of yet another contradiction…?

Blogging versus Motherhood

As I said in the entry It’s been even longer, I don’t intend this blog to be about motherhood, but it is about contradictions, so here is one. In the same entry I questioned my return to blogging when I have so many other pressures on my time: in particular, why am I blogging when I should be being a mother. By which I mean, a better mother.

Such is the nature of our lives, and of my children, that I can’t really deprive them of my actual presence and attention by blogging. As hinted at in previous entries, most of my writing is done when they are asleep and I should be (although right now, I am being extra self-indulgent by writing this during daylight hours, between forkfuls of my late, microwave-reheated lunch, while my son is at school and my baby daughter finishes her nap in the bouncy chair next to me. The lunch aspect being the reason why I am not obliging myself to immediately dive into awaiting housework (washing up, laundry) or my thankfully-sometimes-doable-at-home work (current focus: exam corrections).

What I mean is, I sometimes feel guilty about the time I spend writing when I could/should be, for example, making flashcards to teach my son to read, baking cakes for his play dates, or absorbing parenting books to help me better master one of the most challenging jobs in the world (and practically the only one in which no one checks qualifications and suitability before engagement). What’s more, sometimes, writing about anything other than the sheer beauty of my daughter’s smiles and gurgles, or the glorious ecstasy of watching my two children gazing lovingly at each other, lying in our bed on a Sunday morning, seems somehow just plain ungrateful.  What? She writes/thinks about inane concepts like the downfall of humanity? Doesn’t she realise how lucky she is to have two such beautiful, healthy children, a good job, a nice house, etc. etc…

And of course, by devoting blogging time and space to such a subject, I have added a further layer of paradox to the theme of this blog that does nothing whatsoever to assuage my guilt.

Facebook face-off

Like my approach electronic gadgets (discussed in Technology in my Pocket), my relationship with so-called ‘social networking media’ such as Facebook is riddled with contradictions. Facebook in particular scares me with its unhealthy power and ubiquity. It requires and promotes the use of yet more planet-guzzling electronic equipment, as well as augmenting that invisible cloud of wi-fi waves, mobile phone radiation and GPS signals which constantly bombards our fragile cells.  I don’t know whether to consider it symptomatic or emblematic of all that is wrong with our current society, but I think it is dangerous and damaging to human relationships, communication skills and literacy. And I am completely hooked and check my account several times a day.

Again, as with technology, I didn’t jump onto the bandwagon easily. Back in another time and place, we had just finished painstakingly constructing our website for our amateur rock band, when suddenly nobody had websites anymore – everyone had Myspace pages (remember that?) No sooner had I got to grips with the friend requests and emoticons of Myspace, than I started receiving invitations to join this weird thing called Facebook. I resisted a long time, and then finally caved in and set up an account, early one Saturday morning, for no good reason (for some reason I remember this – I believe I was still in my dressing gown). That was the rest of the morning gone, and many, many hours since (although not as many as my Other Half likes to believe).

I have some genuine uses and excuses for Facebook. I live in a different country to most of my family and many friends, so it enables me to more easily keep in regular contact with more people, and provides a means of communicating and sharing in my native tongue. As many on my friends list are from school or university days, we are of the same generation, and are moving through life-changing events at roughly the same pace; as parenthood started kicking in, it was surprisingly useful to share gripes, worries, empathy and experiences with people I haven’t spoken to face-to-face (as opposed to face-to-facebook) for many years, and across a diverse network of people who have all known me, in some time, place and context, but don’t necessarily know each other.

But I sense that the current dominance of ‘networking’ format tools for communication is changing the nature of human interaction, and not in a healthy way. Once upon a time, if I wanted to get or keep in touch with someone, I wrote them a letter (later an email), composed and addressed for them specifically. (Okay, so bulk mail-shots and email lists are possible, and have their place – although I remember my mother’s dislike of receiving bulk generic letters from acquaintances with the Christmas cards, with the only personal touch being our names inked in at the top). With Facebook and the like, the author is the narcissistic centre of their “net” – the communication becomes much more one-sided, more about the author only. I can follow the lives of people I was at school with, or met once on a course years ago, without ever actually exchanging a direct word with them. (In truth, if it weren’t for facebook, I would have probably never had any contact with many of these people ever again in my life). I post about me -  how I am feeling, a complaint or idea I have, something I find funny or interesting and would like to share – but I just put it out there for others to make of it what they will, or ignore.

Of course, it is easy to show appreciation for a post by simply clicking the convenient “like” button, or to ‘share’ a particularly humorous or philosophical post on our own timelines/newsfeeds in order to bask in a little reflected glory. It is easy to add a ‘comment’, and maybe even start a bit of a discussion with friends of friends of the initial poster (I once had a dinging argument, comment-by-comment, with a guy I have never met who had put a bigoted, racist comment to something a mutual friend had posted, that I simply couldn’t let lie). But does any of this count as real communication? Is it damaging our facility to react with anything more complex than click-on opinions and typed one-liners?

I appreciate it when people share funny stuff, because I like to laugh; thought-provoking or socially aware stuff, because it makes me think; informative stuff, because I like to learn; personal news, because after all, all of these people were part of my life at some point, and it’s nice to keep up with what’s become of them. But I’m sure I am not alone in having ‘friends’ that also share their most inane thoughts and actions; photos of their cats or their lunch; umpteen ‘must-see-it-will-change-your-life’ videos; blow-by-blow accounts of illnesses circulating their families or their own bodies; every move they make (aided by the handy in-phone GPS functions). And the need to share all this, in my opinion, has gone far beyond conviviality amongst friends, to become a compulsion in its own right. For some, it seems, the priority is no longer to experience life, but to share it on Facebook.

Of course, I’m not obliged to read it, let alone comment it, “like” it or share it. If I don’t want to be bugged by people’s Facebook behaviour, it’s my responsibility to resist logging on. But the fact that all this is even possible, and seems to have become rather normal, adds to that specific type of worrying that is the subject of this blog. This move towards ever-more egocentric forms of communication can only lead humanity further down the road of its own destruction.

Technology in my pocket

One of the most obvious manifestations of my modern-day inner conflict is my relationship with technology. I really am not a jump-on-the-bandwagon, always wanting the next-best-thing, upgrading-just-because-I-can type person. My approach to the panoply of gadgets with which our consumer society controls us is much more convoluted.

Take my recently-acquired smartphone, for example. I resisted for what I’d like to think was a respectable amount of time. I waited until my existing mobile was at least a little on the blink (well, it crashed a couple of times). I didn’t go for the latest, greatest addition to the market, but spent many agonizing hours circling around online comparison sites and reviews to choose a model and subscription that met my “needs” without being too flash. It seemed like almost everyone around me had a smartphone; surely I was missing something? A smartphone could save time, I could work during the morning commute, it would make me more efficient; in short, I succeeded in convincing myself that I needed one.

So now I have joined the ranks of those travellers who seem unable to function without their smartphone glued to a palm on the tram. We check emails we would be able to check more easily on our office computers in fifteen minutes’ time; we waste precious MB on Facebook; we play 101 variations of Solitaire; we ruin our eyes peering at e-book applications (because, of course, it is far too inconvenient to also carry a book). A journey without a multitasking phone seems like such a waste of time, and interminably boring.

Then I arrive at my destination, elbow my way off the tram, and shove my phone, often together with my ipod, into the dodgy pocket of my winter coat, worn and somewhat scruffy because I tell myself I can’t afford a new one. To this technology-fest add the laptop computer in my bag (which I can currently justify as being work-issue), and often an external hard drive and flash drive or two. The sheer volume of wiring, rare earth metals and memory space about my not-terribly-well-dressed person on an average day is, when I think about it, rather terrifying and abhorrent. And yet it all seems so necessary and normal.

I know, yet I am fooled. I am aware, yet I am ignorant. I feel the fear, but I am obviously not afraid enough - yet.