the more you know, the harder it is on you

The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief.
To increase knowledge only increases sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

Ecclesiastes is in my daily Bible reading right now, so I am seeing several things in it that strike me. And this is one.

The more you know, the harder it is on you. I believe that to a large point, the old adage “Ignorance is bliss” is true. The less you know, the less you have to worry about. Simple people tend to be happier.

My wife and I are two examples of this. Ella is by no means unlearned, but she and I have a totally different outlook on life.

I am an accumulator of information. I find it everywhere and it sticks in my mind. What is more, for the most part, I remember a lot of it.

Ella, on the other hand, enjoys receiving new information, but will not go out of her way to get it. She enjoys it (to a point) when I bring up new things, but does not go out to seek it on her own.

It makes for a marked difference in our personalities. Quite frankly, I know too much. And the more I know, the more it weighs on me. The accumulated information does not necessarily help me. She knows what she wants to know and is happy. I have to know more and am not, as a general rule, a happy guy.

And I learn a lot of stuff I don’t need to know because that is the way I am made. Some things I learn, I do not tell her because it would make her unhappy or bothered. But it is a personality quirk of mine that I have to learn them.

Once I do, they sit in there inside the maelstrom that is many times my mind. They may come out at some odd time and people are surprised that I know whatever it is I know, but in general, most of the knowledge I accumulate is useless. It is a shame I do not go to cocktail parties, because the kind of stuff I know would be great there.

Occasionally I will ask her, maybe while we are driving around, what are you thinking about?

Her response will be something like, I was thinking about how pretty those flowers are. Or I was thinking about the song we just heard on the radio.

I am usually thinking about 17 things, all unrelated, all of them twirling around inside my brain competing for attention. And there are times when I would love just to shut them all up, to think about flowers without thinking about conversations from 30 years ago, and something I had read, and the Hebrew word for something and what might happen to the van next, and something I had read and the political situation in America right now and missing my kids and our financial situation and my knee hurting and – on.

I envy her in her ability just to let things go.