daily java

Daily Java:

Intelligent people are always ready to learn.
    Their ears are open for knowledge. (Proverbs 18: 15)

When I was a little boy, my family and I were somewhere listening to somebody talk about something. No idea what or where, but it was some kind of information thing, like a museum or exhibit. One of the group asked a question that was a little on the dumb side, but at the same time one I didn’t know the answer to. You know the kind of question: it had a simple answer, and no one wanted to ask it for fear of looking silly, but at the same time, no one really knew the answer.

The person giving the demonstration answered the question and all of a sudden, the whole group was more educated.

I commented that it was a silly question to my father, and he told me that the person who had asked was an extremely intelligent person who had a lot of education. In other words, he was smart enough to look a little dumb in order to increase his knowledge.

How many times do we sit through “lessons” in which we do not learn a key part? And how often do we go without asking for simple clarification for fear of looking foolish? Which means that we stay foolish for fear of looking foolish.

Intelligent people want to know things. There is the old adage “knowledge is power” and to a large extent it is true. Knowledge is no good whatever if you do not know enough to use it.

I suppose that is one reason why I ask people so many questions. I want to know more. I always have. And the sad thing I found much of my college “experience” to be useless because the information I learned was for the most part rote and worthless. And I also found, oddly enough, that many of the questions I asked of my college professors they did not know. In fact, I found that on many of the subjects we were studying, my knowledge was broader than theirs and they had graduate degrees.

I guess they had gone through their educational process doing just enough to get by and to get a degree, where I was trying to learn something.

That doesn’t make me smarter than anyone else or anything like that. But I guess it makes me a little odd to some. I always ask. I always want to know.

It irritates some and I don’t know why. Most people, I suppose, just want to live and let live, to just go through their lives with the minimum effort and “not make waves” by asking questions.

I always applied that same thing to people. I want to know about them, so I ask questions. My son said one day that I asked people entirely too many questions. Then he said, on the other hand, I know more about people than most do. I said that was the point. I want to know things.

My children do not share this quest for knowledge. I have always been a voracious reader, even to the point of reading the dictionary and encyclopedias. I even read ingredients on boxes and cans. I just want to know.

It has done me no real good, I will have to admit. I have accomplished little from the great amount of knowledge I have accumulated. And as I get older, I am losing a lot of that knowledge. The things I learned when I was 30 do not matter many times when I am 62, and I guess the mental hard drive is in the process of being overwritten.

If I had it to do again (a theme that seems to be dominant for this part of my life), I would ask more questions, go to school more, read more, searched more, learned more things, keep my ears open for knowledge.