Dear Friend,
For years I have felt driven to pursue knowledge. This is one of my passions. I love to learn.
And in all of those years, the experience has always been the same. I will learn some facts, that then lead me to want to understand something even more. I will then gather more information, and tie that into all else that I understand to be true.
Eventually, a basic understanding of some significant question will seem to be on the immediate horizon. After a few dead ends, and some persistence, the answer to the question will be obvious.
Yet, despite this success, the solution of this one problem will invariably lead to the rise of several other, equally significant problems. The big answer that I was pursuing now seems farther away than ever. Sometimes I feel like the mouse whose cheese keeps being moved further and further away each time he pursues it.
The only rational conclusion that I can derive from this experience is that, the more one learns, the more one realizes how little he really knows about anything. There may have been a day when I might have felt puffed up with certainty about my understanding of how the world works. But that day is long gone. The universe is simply too complex a thing to be comprehended by minor creatures such as ourselves.
So, if what I say is true, how should any of us respond to this reality of ours? Is the pursuit of knowledge mere folly? Certainly not, I would say. The quality of our lives has been improved significantly as a direct result of the pursuit of knowledge. Is the effort to understand our own reality a kind of Chinese finger puzzle, that only gets progressively harder the more we try to solve it? Perhaps.
I like to think that we benefit by pursuing a better understanding of the reality that we exist within. Yet, we should not be waiting until some magical “theory of everything” answers all of our questions before we celebrate our victories. It is the process of learning itself, and those small victories that we do achieve, that are our true success. Celebrate now, what you achieve today. There is no destination to life, or to the pursuit of knowledge. There is only the pursuit itself.
All the best,
Hugh
