A Reflection on Inquisitive Humility

"The waters are in motion all the time, but the moon retains its serenity. The mind moves in response to the ten thousand situations but remains ever the same. " - B. Lee

I think I’ve had a hard time stomaching my ignorance at times. Humility is telling me you’re excited about the prospects of knowing nothing, cockiness tells me I’m insecure about it. When I was a kid I tied my sense of self-worth on my apparent or actual intelligence. In ‘grande section’ when I couldn’t figure out why a fragmented triangle was made up of 15 total triangles rather than 14 smaller triangles I cried uncontrollably and refused any hints. Such a strong attachment to the outcomes of my inquiries gets in the way of how far and openly I’m willing to investigate without throwing a fit or running to some past achievement or quoting some obscure thinker, running behind the apparent image of my intelligence for some kind of comfort in my rigid and monolithic sense of identity. Sometimes I’d rather seem ‘smart’ than be curious, trying to find the answer to the mystery I’m faced with. Unwilling to identify what it is I don’t yet know that would get me closer to the answer.

Curiosity is so much less fun when its done to calm my inescapable and grounded insecurities that I know nothing, or at the very least, that no great work can be uncovered without doing the work in excavating the meaning behind my impression of it. Maybe even avoid doing the honest work of understanding a writer’s views as they intended them before polluting their account with my own abstractions and confusions, convincing myself readily that I know exactly what the author means without departing from every readers initial starting point: ignorance to this particular fragment, this relative viewpoint of the much larger picture. Even then we rarely ever understand it as its Creator intended it, neither the fragment nor the ever-larger picture.

Not to mention that whatever we’ve found is never ours to keep, it'll be like a straw claiming to have contained the wind that breezed through it. Can't claim it at least, without becoming enslaved by our obsession with capturing luminaries in our a snowglobes. Imprisoning what only ends up chaining us. The Moby Dicks whose obsessive hunts consume our soul.

Sometimes I might even avoid having a clear and definitive stance in fear of being detracted from it, and with it my feeble sense of identity as ‘intelligent’. My homie Swagdy once said something along the line of 'if you rigidly define your identity by one thing or another, you'll always insecure about it'. Once something comes along and challenges this trait which you ground your whole sense of identity on, your selfhood, personality and agency shatters with it. Like a spider's nest in the wind, if you immovably define yourself by your 'goodness' or 'intellect', 'beauty or 'capacity', your tap-dancing skillz or your even your likeableness in the eyes of your homie's parents, not only will you be constantly in distress about goodness, or smarts, or prettiness or capacitation. Once something challenges these identifications, we'll be shook. In our social relations we might even become defensive in one way or another. What do you mean I CAN'T TAPDANNCE WHOO TF ARE YOU??? My ability to have a good time absolutely hinges on you telling me I smashed my 'buck time step' into an 'over the top' riff walk on 7 beats? So if you can't even acknowledge that well then fuck you dhude.

I’ll avoid reading and surrendering to the text faithfully in fear of getting to the final word having understood not but one thing, that my monolithic identity as 'smart' has been A SHAM. All along, just a miserable wives tale, a mythic legend that failed to capture this crippling moment of defeat infront of the impenetrable fortress that is your homie's final report for class. Worse yet, I'll avoid it in fear that my unyielding beliefs might change! Or even that I won't be enough for Love now that I'm certifiably 'dumb', or a 'bad person', or ugly or whatever. To that I say: so what? So what if I don't get it, the first, second, or third time, so what if I go the rest of my life incapable of digesting this or that text. Firstly, improbable if I put in the honest labor of understanding it. Secondly, I’m not any less or more for knowing more or less than I know – knowing is a secondary function of living anyways, to be able to feel is much braver – for being capable of more or less than I am, for being aloof or ignorant, for thinking people from Sudan were called Sugandese.

So WHAT? You think everyone just walks around knowing how far the North Star is, or how to fix a Honda B-Series DOHC I4 VTEC engine, how to make rice or whatever a boson is, dude I can’t even spell Massachuchets and I don’t wanna know saraha. Undermined not only by the epistemic barriers our humanity places on all of us due to our sensibilities, our place in the Universe and the limited and luminous tools we have to explore it as observers gridlocked in Time. Undermined also by our bio-political and social environment as well, debilitating the humanity we vowed to care for by withholding or hampering material conditions necessary to facilitate seeing our World with an open heart. Apart from never really ACTUALLY being able to understand quite literally ANY THING in-itself beyond information about it in a linguistic and ideological codification I can comprehend given my biological and spiritual limitations as a human body & soul in this part of the globe living in this century; apart from all THAT! I’m still a doofus with questionable social skills, huge glares in basic adult survival skills about shit that doesn’t even matter (THE RICE JUST GETS SOGGY, and flavoreless??)  an insane amount of personal inadequacies or proclivities for other stuff, that keep me from getting “it”. It’s okay, really, I’m much more than my so called ‘intelligence’ the word really doesn’t mean any more than a finger like all other fingers pointing at the Moon. Especially when I’m also my willingness to ask about what I don’t know, and acknowledge what my limitations keep me from seeing! It's only when we accept that we know nothing that we become equipped for observing and inquiring about everything.

If you think material hubris is silly, comparing how many rocks you collected knowing full well we’re all going to die and leave these bodies and possessions behind, just picture how silly it is to compare how much immaterial foam you've managed to remember. Not even collect, knowledge isn't something we keep stored like water in a flooding library, instead, its experienced, most earnestly when it is observed like a scuba diver who swims amongst corals but leaves them untouched, or a pilot that flies between the clouds knowing full well if they tried to capture the floating fluff it would fall between their fingers, or even an astronaut that knows they'll never be able to bring a star home. How silly is it to compare how much water we filled in a bucket from an ocean we all swim in, or how many stars we've counted and communed with when we're all just as capable of looking up. Especially when the very condition of observing and wondering with an unclouded heart and mind is surrender to a natural existant so much bigger than what we are, one whose account necessarily stands outside the command of any single and isolated mind. An image that only reveals itself to those who wonder and observe outside and besides themselves, without the handicaps of ego, without the inquisitive attachments to pre-conceived notions or rigid outcomes that shape our process of inquiry. What's the point of projecting the image we have of the moon onto its surface through the tip of our pointed finger? The Moon is out there for all of us to observe, in its natural beauty; let the lights be, for themselves and in themselves. 

P.S: Sugandeesnutz