Ok, bear with me. We have two more weeks of this - including this one.Seems a simple enough thing, eh?
You find something you don't know about, hunt down a good book or watch a tv show or ask somebody, and then you know more about it.
There's a whole bunch of reasons to learn something:
- Lording knowledge over the less knowledgeable
- Impressing girls with your knowledge of Batman
- Winning every trivia game you enter
- Meet people and have a bit of fun Get to know another people and culture
- the ability to create your own future
Ignorance doesn't even know that it's ignorant. Knowledge and intelligence, however, are always looking for more knowledge.
It's a quizical thing to think that knowledge is something that gets hungrier and hungrier the more you feed it, but that's almost how this works. Once you learn something, you find more and more questions that need to be answered. Instead of a vicious circle, it's a wonderful, self-catalyzing cycle.
Plus there's the sheer joy of udnerstanding how things work, how everything is interconnected. Life is - in my eyes - so much richer if you see where the lynch pins of everything are held.
It's a question that I ask of my honors chemistry students early in their year: is the world more beautiful if you know how it works, or does that knowledge tear away the beauty for you.
I am always disappointed when one of them writes that knowledge does tear away the beauty, but it is simply a very different world view than the one I have. For me, knowing about the atoms and forces and reactions of the world, knowing the motives and history of those involved makes that world much richer for me.
So, do yourself a favor and pick something taht you've been wonderfing about and start learning.
Go read about a music group, learn how to make something, find out about something you never knew existed.
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