I Still Don’t Know What I’m Doing

Sixty years.  In terms of human longevity, that’s a comparatively long span of time.  At the very least, it sounds like a solid number – a fairly hefty chunk of years.  That’s how long I’ve been breathing the air and watching the sunrises and sunsets from the vantage point of Planet Earth’s surface.  That’s how long I’ve had to bone up on the lessons that life’s (purportedly) been dishing out.  That’s how long I’ve had to get smarter.  That’s how long it’s taken me to realize that the “getting smarter” part ain’t happening.  The notion of “knowledge” is funny that way.  The more I think I know, the more I know I don’t know.

Look, some of the smartest guys in the world can’t seem to agree on this bull-riding show.  Descartes says if you’re thinking, than you’re actually really here.  Sartre’s with Descartes on this up until he posits that if you’re actually really here, and you know it, then you’re really nothing.  Camus thinks thinking (and the people who’re doing it) is absurd, and Kafka believes if you think a lot and end up knowing too much, you could turn into a giant beetle.

And these are the smart guys…

But what’s a blissful idiot like yours truly supposed to think?  What else can I think?  How much do I know, and should I even be thinking about it in the first place?  Pretzel logic.  (Fagen and Becker nailed it.  As far as I’m concerned they’re smarter than all the smart guys put together.)  There’s no end to knowing what I don’t know: the twists and turns always lead me right back here.  I’m sixty years old, with sixty years of accumulated knowledge under my belt, and I still don’t know what I’m doing.

Let’s take my foray into the activity of gardening (which, at first blush, is ostensibly the contextual basis for this digital publication) as an example of this ineffectual knowledge-gathering paradox.  My adventures within this arena offer a reasonable platform for extrapolation: trying to learn all there is to know about keeping living things that are rooted in the soil alive can be, on a tinier yet mostly parallel scale, a lot like trying to learn how to keep one’s own life and its attendant happy accoutrements sustained, and its attendant vicissitudes on a manageable, even keel.  I entertain no illusions regarding my expertise (or more correctly, lack thereof) in both of these endeavors.  My growing lack of knowledge is glaring, and my corresponding ineptitude is vast, and getting vaster by the minute.  And that’s in terms of both growing plants in a garden, AND keeping my shit together at large.

As far as the gardening part of the equation is concerned, it goes down like this:

The year in which I first took up gardening as a quasi-serious activity was a year of spending money, planting plants, killing plants, spending more money, planting more plants, killing more plants, spending even more money, and trying to ease up on the killing spree.  What I was that first year was a spender/planter/plant killer.  What I definitely was not was a gardener.  Not even by the most liberal of standards.  But, I gained some knowledge that first year – quite a bit actually.  I identified my mistakes and applied that knowledge to the task of not repeating them.  I succeeded in stanching the swollen flow of plant deaths.  And what do you know?  Somewhere in my head, it registered that I’d reached some sort of milestone.  I gained (what seemed to me) a small mountain of knowledge, ascended its craggy face, and… reached a plateau.

From this plateau, exciting, glittering vistas of ignorance stretched outward and upward, transcending the boundaries of all possible event horizons generated by my limitless limited knowledge.  These views held the promise of more mistake-making: I knew that I’d be killing new kinds of plants – kinds I’d not yet killed and of which I yet knew absolutely nothing.  And I knew that I’d be killing them in new and inventive ways.  So, you see, the amassing of gardening-specific knowledge had begotten entire new worlds of gardening-specific ignorance.  The more I knew, the more I knew I didn’t know.  I didn’t know what I was doing when I first started, I then gained some knowledge, and that knowledge came with the knowledge that there was more knowledge that I didn’t know about.  Lots of it.  The bottom line: today, as far as my garden is concerned, even though I’m acquiring knowledge on a semi-regular basis, I still don’t know what I’m doing because all of that newly acquired knowledge includes the knowledge of limitless stores of unknown knowledge.  Pretzel logic, for sure.  Catching this wave?

It’s not a stretch to understand that this same paradox exists within the context of my living through each and every one of the years of my life at large.  (I use the first person possessive here since it’s my own tragicomedy of a life I’m dangling out here as an example of knowledge’s incalculable whimsy.  But the theorem is applicable to the life and times of any other poor, confused bastard who just might happen to be reading this, and who just might happen to know knowledge like I know knowledge.)