On Knowledge

We often get swept away by the feeling that we know everything there is to know about everything in the world. We think we have life all figured out.

Very few of us take into consideration our predecessors' journey in life and the lessons they shared in order to make our lives easier than they had it at their time.

Some of us tend to be stubborn when given a piece of advice by someone who might have been in a similar situation to theirs. They prefer to go through life and experience every aspect of it on their own without guidance, precautions, or preconceived notions. It is not that they disrespect whoever proceeded them in living that experience, so much as it is they want to live the experience and see it through their own eyes.

I was going through my personal notes and found one that I wrote in 2017 that says: "the more I know, the more I know that I don't know" ironically enough is that I wrote that note at the time when I was the most active on reading and trying to gain more knowledge on different topics. It was at that same time that I learned the lesson of how knowledge is a never-ending journey.

Reading books is not just for making your brain cells work better, it is also about taking life lessons from others who have gone through a lifetime just to learn them. Let's say you read a biography book whose author lived 70 years, that book holds within it the pure knowledge of a human being through their entire lifetime, their ups, downs, mistakes, success stories, how they overcame hardships, basically everything that has to do with the way they went on about living their lives. If you put it under the microscope, you will get so many lessons out of it, you are literally holding lessons worth 70 years of experience right there between your hands. It is purely ungrateful if you choose not to take some of them that you find relatable and apply them to your life. Now imagine reading another book that has 40 years' worth of experience, you now have your lifetime plus that 70 years and 40 years, if you are 20 years you now have a 130-year-old worth of knowledge to accompany you into your 21st year!

The way I see it is that we could all benefit from each other's life lessons, especially now that time seems to be moving faster than ever, we could use a shortcut to experiencing life through other people's lenses. Of course, there will be certain experiences that we wouldn't really get much out of personally living them and also there would be others where we have to and got no other choice but to go through them ourselves.