Will You Ever Know Enough?

I love garden shows, and Monty Don is one of my favourite presenters. Once, as he roamed around a stunning garden in Spain, he spun to face the camera, flung his arms wide and quipped:

So much to see! So much to learn!

This is so true.  Now that I’m old and running out of time, I frequently face a rising panic that I’ll never get on top of all the things there are to see and learn.

I have so many unanswered questions.

When will AI erase me as a worthwhile human? How can I halt climate change? Will I ever open my Third Eye? (Do I have a Third Eye?)

I read a lot more now that I’m retired, but the more I read the less I seem to know. What I read may answer some of my questions, but they equally raise more questions which the Grim Reaper might not give me enough time to find the answers to.

However, I do my best by borrowing books from two libraries in nearby towns, visiting as many bookshops as possible when in the city, scanning newspaper headlines in news agencies, and consuming material on the net. And hardly a week goes by that I don’t place an order for a book online.

But, recently, a quote attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti stopped my voracious feeding frenzy for answers:

Addiction to knowledge is like any other addiction. It offers an escape from the fear of emptiness, of loneliness, of frustration, the fear of being nothing.

Ah! The truth of this hit me hard. It explained this addiction I have for knowledge. I’m driven to add to my store of knowledge so that I have more value in the eyes of the world. I don’t feel that I am enough just as I am.

My consumption of information comes not from a feeling of curiosity, but from a feeling of lack.

This feeling began to grow years ago.

Although I’m Australian, in my younger years I spent two years in England and another two years in the USA, pursuing a four-year BA degree in church-owned, non-accredited colleges. I graduated with a major in Home Economics and a minor in Theology, which didn’t get me far in a career path when I returned to Australia.

Although I learned and experienced a lot in those years overseas, I’ve since had a lingering feeling that I’m not fully qualified for anything. So, I continue to pursue knowledge to fill the sense of emptiness (not knowing enough) and of being nothing (being unqualified in the eyes of the formal education establishment).

It’s time for me to step off the ever-spinning hamster wheel of knowledge accumulation because there isn’t enough knowledge available in this world to satisfy my feelings of emptiness and fear of unworthiness.

The more I try to satisfy my feelings of emptiness and worthlessness, the more empty and worthless I feel.

I need to let go of these feelings because they’re not doing me any good.

Several thoughts have arisen following this realisation.

Eckhart Tolle wrote in Oneness with All Life (2008, p. 6):

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

I have been making myself unhappy for years by thinking that I never knew enough to live a fulfilled and valuable life, when the real situation is that I am enough just as I am. My supposed lack was a product of my own imagination.

It’s like a weight has fallen from my shoulders. I don’t need to fear not knowing something, and I don’t need to fear being nothing.

Of course I’ll keep reading. It’s one of my daily pleasures. But I’ll do it differently. I’ll let go of my fearful egoic need to know more, and read, instead, with curiosity and wonder.

Like Monty Don said – and it’s worth repeating:

So much to see! So much to learn!