EVERYTHING I EVER LEARNED

Three months ago I finished school for good.  I’d had years of it in various places, and then everything was over – very suddenly.

It is really sinking in now because everyone else is starting again.  For so long it felt to me as though life would always be the same pattern of either being in school or waiting to be there again.  The anticipation was pleasant, the reality less so, but it was constant, and consistency is a calming influence.

I’ll develop my own consistency, and it will be hard, but it will be worth it.  And now,  just as there is beginning to be more distance between me and school than there has ever been before, I feel ready to articulate what I spent seventeen years learning.

I have learned how little I know.

For all the facts I ever memorized for a test, there are scads of facts that I will never remember, that I will never even realize that I am missing.  For every detail I absorbed there are multitudes that never made it to me, and many that I will never learn.  Each bit of knowledge about music and mythology and grammar and anthropology and literature and chemistry and geometry – every new thing I have found out – each stands for millions of libraries worth of knowledge that I do not have.

Earlier this year I wrote in my notebook: “Are you ever overwhelmed by how many interesting things there are to find out?  How will you every get to all the good stuff?”  I could feel the weight of centuries of learning that preceded me, and it was crushing.  There was so much I didn’t know and wished I did.

There is a common misconception: that the reason for school is to fill your mind with information.  To know things.  And while it may seem intuitively correct, I don’t believe it anymore.  I spent seventeen years giving proof of what I did know so that I could emerge on the other side with the conviction that it was all merely a drop in a vast bucket.

Here is the test, the only one that matters.  It is formless and as large as it is brief.  It is a single question.

How much do you know?

And finally I can answer.

Not very much.