22/01/2012

"I know."

What were to happen if we did have the ability to know everything about something? What if the possibility of knowing everything existed?

Say for instance, I know I need to get to Kanjur station quickly because a usual, I'm running late. It's 6:30 pm, and

the traffic is a mad, ravaging beast of screeching horns and savage wheels, a growling, yelling, vicious, anxious metallic beast, with its guts spilling out in all directions on the road, and

I know I'm going to get frustrated by the fact that the BMC/BEST has shifted the bus stop farther away from Main Gate, and built a road divider in between the lane going towards Kanjur/Eastern Express Highway, in an effort to create a separate lane for buses, but because bikers and company buses choke this lane, BEST buses usually take the other lane meant for everybody else, while I do an angry, dangerous dance from one lane to the other, and

I know that as a result of the frustration and lack of time, I'm going to hitch a bike-ride to Kanjur. 

It is so defeating to know everything. Surprises are lost. The kick you get out of doing something differently is lost. The exquisite angst of an existential crisis is lost, the overwhelming brightness and warmth of an epiphany is lost. The wonder at your abilities to do something you never imagined you could, is lost.

While reading the paper yesterday, I chanced upon an article by Jaron Lanier. He wrote a paper called One-Half of a Manifesto (2000), on opposing "cybernetic totalism". I quote Wiki -

At the end he warns that the biggest problem of any theory (esp. iedology) is not that it is false, "but when it claims to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality." The impression of objective necessity paralyzes the ability of humans to walk out of or to fight the paradigm, and causes the self-fulfilling destiny, which spoils people.

Isn't it amazing that we don't know everything, yet here we are, living life, making mistakes, celebrating, waking up everyday?

goodness.

 My first response to reading this blog again was, seriously, a post on parenting - that was what I last posted about? I can't help but ...