I Still Don't Know What I'm Doing

I Still Don’t Know What I’m Doing

I Still Don't Know What I'm Doing

The notion of “knowledge” is a complicated one.  At least it is for me.  The longer I live, the more I think I know.  The more I think I know, the less I think I understand.  The less I think I understand, the more I think I don’t know.  And it continues, evidently in perpetuity, in this vein.  If I shake my head and take a minute to clear the mental cache, I realize that the only thing I know for certain is, after all the years I’ve spent walking the surface of this planet, I still don’t know what I’m doing.

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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.)

I hold this truth to be self-evident: In life, knowledge begets ignorance.  Or at the very least, it begets questions, mysteries.  Who hasn’t looked into the familiar eyes of a life-long lover and half-glimpsed the cryptic words of strange and shimmering untold manuscripts?  Or felt thrumming, alien syncopations while breast-to-breast, locked in an age-old embrace, in the throes of a union at once as comfortable as an old cardigan and as savage and strange and as rhythmic and undeniable as a siren’s refrain, pulsing in waves from an uncharted shore?  Who among us really, truly knows that old familiar life-long lover?  Don’t we ever find ourselves in the arms of a stranger we thought we knew?  Knowledge – and the construct we’ve formed as the result of its gaining – fails as it takes us to the precipice and offers us glimpses of the swirling, unknown gulfs beyond.  And, what about us?  Ourselves?  As individuals?  After decades worth of mornings shaving the same face, or the same pair of legs, do we really know who we are?  When every experience that has ever played out in our lives and every bit of knowledge we’ve attained informs a routine as implacable and as predictable as the sun that rises and sets, do we ever find ourselves asking “Why the hell did I do that?”  Maybe these sorts of questions should be left for Sartre and his pals to answer.  But they’re still reasonable questions, bullshit prolixity and melodrama notwithstanding.  And I think they go a decent way toward helping me make my point.  The more we know, whether it’s about our lives, our loves, or ourselves, the less we understand.

Pretzel logic, I’m tellin’ ya.  Just ask, and any major dude will tell you the same thing: “After all these years, I still don’t  know what I’m doing.”

Cheers, and Happy Gardening!

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12 thoughts on “I Still Don’t Know What I’m Doing”

  1. This is a basic truth for all of us. The smartest guy is the one who realizes how little he knows. He’s the smartest guy in the room!

    1. Agreed. The more an individual knows about something or someone, the greater the platform for discovering new possibilities and new truths. Thanks for reading and commenting, Kevin.

  2. You’re so funny, John.

    20 + years ago I decided that the time would come when I wouldn’t be able to garden anymore so I started buying Japanes maples and bonsaing them. So now – 24 years later I have all these very short Japanes maples [the tallest is maybe 6 feet tall].

    I have mondo grass in pots – which continue to thrive. I still have the one succulent that I bought from a grower here in Washington state that is thriving and spreading – in pots.

    I have a beautiful rhododendron [the Washington state flower] in a giant pot that blooms each year in several colours.

    Going out in a garden and trying to do any kind of yard work is impossible for me anymore. So I sit on our back deck and look at the beauty of all the Japanese maples and the other assorted plants that are in pots.

    Life is good.

    1. Thank you for reading the piece and commenting, Annie. And thank you for discussing these wonderful highlights from your own growing adventures. Your trees and plants are lovely, I’m sure. Your own knowledge-gathering paradigm, with respect to your plants, has obviously been successful. Thanks once again, Annie.

      1. You’re welcome, John. It is kind of amusing to see a mini forest [I think I have 8 or 9 Japanese maple trees not] of Japanese maples – all of them no more than 6 feet tall. I did the same with a gingko biloba tree but gave it away to a friend years ago – she planted it in the ground and apparently now it has grown quite a bit.

        For several years a neighbor used to come and pull the trees out of their pots [every 3 – 5 years for me] so that I could trim back the root to about 2 feet then re-pot them. But sadly he passed a few years ago. Now when I see the root coming out of the side of the pot I just whack them off. 🙂

        I want to share a story about my oldest Japanese maple. For almost all of its 24 years with me it was bright red. Then last year I decided to move it to the side of the house so that the other Japense Maples could spread their leaves a bit better and not be so crowded. Since I moved it – the leaves now come in dark green. I told my former nursery lady about it – I might take a picture to send to her – and she seemed to think it was because I moved it those 30 feet from where it had lived for over 20 years.

        1. How very interesting, Annie – thank you so much for sharing the story of your trees. The change in foliage color may very well be a result of the change in that established little tree’s long-time location. Your mini forest sounds enchanting. Thank you so much, Annie.

          1. Before all the leaves fall off – I will try to remember to go outside and take a picture of them. They are all in pots – and have always been in pots. We don’t plant in the ground here. We’re in a mobile part – with septic – and were asked by the previous park owner to NOT plant trees in the ground.

  3. Hopefully we learn and grow every day. The more I learn the more I realize there is still so much more to learn. I concur with your thesis.

    1. Thanks for having a read of it, Rick. And thanks for commenting. It’s daunting, really. The fact that the attainment of knowledge begets further inquiry is a marvel of human thought and existence. The hominid brain is a absolutely wondrous in its complexity and its limitless potential for garnering experience and fomenting the formulation of knowledge.

  4. Great subject of reflection !!!
    This is one subject I could talk about for hours on end…

    I will only say a few words 👉 At the end of it all, it doesn’t matter what you know or don’t know on this planet… you are here to feel and experience…. because deep inside (you, the soul) knows everything, it just wants to experience…. 😊🌸

    1. Thank you for reading the piece, Roxxy, and thank you for your wonderful, insightful thoughts on this subject. Your assessment is spot-on. I absolutely agree with you. Thanks once again, Roxxy.

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