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Things We Think We Know Already

The things you have always known are sometimes the hardest to express. Humans, as a whole, tend to focus more on understanding newly-discovered things than think about the things that are supposedly obvious. When you walk outside during the day, do you usually think about the sky being blue or contemplate the mechanisms that control weather? Unless you're a scientist or just basically curious person, probably not. But that doesn't mean that the sky isn't blue or that weather patterns don't exist.

So, too, with our inner knowledge and perceptions. We tend to take things for granted, otherwise we wouldn't have sayings like "You don't know what you have until it's gone." I don't know why this seems to be true, but we can use only what we have to work with, and therefore must progress along the path of life realizing this tendency in our thought patterns (or lack thereof) and figuring out how to deal with it.

Someone once said "The unexamined life is not worth living." Perhaps he was trying to tell us this truth, although many don't seem to have understood the deeper meaning. Most people are so caught op in percieving the surface reality that they don't realize how much more meaning there is in its depths. Perhaps they are not ready to understand these truths, or perhaps they just don't know how to go about uncovering them. We are taught many things by the society we live in, and not all of them are good. Many people complain about this fact, but few ever go deeper within themselves to discover the truths they already know without having to be told.

Many people realize that by attending college they can learn more than they used to know about many subjects. However, few realize how much they can learn from their past experiences. College is an experience. So is a relationship. So why do people keep repeating the same mistakes from one relationship to the next, when they try to improve their knowledge of the college course material in order to improve their test scores?

Perhaps they take it for granted that they're learning from past mistakes, but apparently most of them are just blowing hot air. Humans, for some reason, prefer to act as if we know more than we really do. However, this usually causes problems at one time or another and we end up having to learn things the hard way instead. Someone even developed a name for this. It's called "the school of hard knocks." Stubbornness may be a good quality when we're trying to accomplish a difficult goal, but sometimes we're stubborn about the wrong things.

Most of us have thought "I know I shouldn't do this..." but we still do it anyway. This has happened in many situations and for many reasons. Perhaps people are just masochists at heart...ever notice how you can't quite seem to stop sticking your tongue in the hole where a tooth used to be? Or perhaps we're just too stubborn to listen to ourselves when everything tells us to behave (or not behave) in a certain way. And if we won't even listen to ourselves, who WILL we listen to?

Of course, that's providing we know ourselves well enough to listen to our inner feelings. It's a scary thing to look inside yourself and see something you don't like. Most people want to believe they're basically good people when it comes down to it, and are distressed when they find out they aren't as good as they expected to be. Then they lock the knowledge up again and avoid doing anything to make them see that horrible, painful truth again. Which only causes more stress than there was already.

Perhaps a lot of stress could be eliminated if we actually faced who we are inside, even if we don't like what we see. Just knowing something is wrong allows for the possibility of making it right, whether you know how to at the moment or not. If we really believed we were good and worthwhile people deep down inside, maybe we'd give ourselves enough credit to realize we can change the things we don't like about ourselves, even if it takes time. Sure it's not always easy, but should it be? If a task is easy to accomplish, do you get as much satisfaction from accomplishing it as you would if it seemed nearly impossible to do? By and large, society has conditioned us to take the easy path, and to abhor anything that takes a little effort. However, from all appearances, this is the opposite of what the human psyche appears to need.

Many of us say we seek the meaning of life. But perhaps the meaning of life is contained somewhere within the deepest, scariest parts of our inner selves. Maybe we already know some of its aspects and are either too afraid to realize them or just don't realize anything's in there but dust bunnies. Maybe we would all be better people if we stopped to examine what's inside, whether it scares us or not. The truth of the matter is, most of us just don't know what's in there. And the unknown is scary. People don't like to admit that they don't know something they think they SHOULD know, nor do they enjoy being wrong. Some of us just deal with it better than others. And some of us actually learn from it.

© 1999 by the author (i.e. ME, you idiots ;P)

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