NONFICTION |ESSAY
This Can Save Your Life
A call to action
Last week, I wrote a simple story. It was a drabble about a dictionary with lots of information that could save it. But it perished in a fire. The story was a flex of my artistic license. A Metaphor. But it ended up being a polarizing story.
Like all fictional pieces, it wasn’t real, but as with polarizing pieces, it split my audience right in the middle. Some of them got the message- it was simple: afterall, knowledge isn’t power; knowledge is knowledge. The others didn’t; they felt it was almost nonsense; one critiqued the character in my story for relying on a dictionary. I get it; sometimes, stories shapeshift into different forms than they were in the writer’s head. But the story wasn’t my point; as with all my pieces, the lesson was.
At the end of the week, I re-read one of my favourite short pieces — a commencement speech turned into a small book — This is Water, by David Foster Wallace. In it, the famous author championed the importance of independent thinking, the kind that separates one from the herd. The writer described this thought process as the capital truth about life before death, as the way to making it to thirty or fifty without wanting to shoot oneself in the head.
I was affected, the way people are when they encounter truth. But moments later, while reading about the author, I was affected again, in the way people are, when they encounter tragedy. The author had ended his life. I must confess that the effect of the tragedy outweighed that of the wisdom in his book.
It could be that ‘we ‘thing- the human fascination with melancholy, our captivation with the macabre.
Maybe it’s a ‘me’ thing, my biased expectation that someone who knew so much could die from what he warned his audience about. Whatever the case.
It reminded me of the drabble, a piece that could also be titled as the Uselessness of Knowledge, the Powerlessness of Knowledge.
One would assume that someone consumed with such life-altering knowledge would not have their lives altered and consumed with their hands.
I wish I had the answers.
Trust me; I do not doubt or make light of the illness called depression; I do not discountenance the fact that those who commit suicide are powerless against the disease; what gripped me in a vice is the fact that it is possible to know something and not ‘know- how’ to use it. This is the difference between knowing a concept and having an experience.
It reminded me of a wheel, such a powerful device and also a powerless one. Wheels are great; they offer us the promise of agency. When you see a wheel, you’re reminded of motion, power, purpose, and possibilities.
It’s more like knowledge. Knowledge is great; having it fills one with power. Knowledge sets one apart; it makes one aware of possibilities alien to or hidden from one’s contemporaries.
But I also realized that wheels can represent purpose without being purposeful.
Wheels can represent power without being powerful.
They can represent everything that is possible, and that’s all they can be — everything that can be.
Science describes wheels or bodies at their resting state as objects with potential energy. This potential energy is knowledge, a hoard of usable, dispensable and fungible potential.
Science also describes a moving wheel or object in motion as having kinetic energy. And this Kinetic energy, permit me to say, is wisdom or the application of knowledge.
It is kinetic energy that brings about change. It is kinetic energy that turns “know” into “know-how.”
I realized that this is what the character in my drabble expected of the dictionary and what I expected of David Forster Wallace.
It reminded me that we have all been there before, and maybe we will find ourselves there this week — at the crossroads between knowing and doing.
At the intersection of knowledge and wisdom.
If there is any point to this piece, it is to ensure that we keep our wheels moving. That we keep our ‘wills’ in motion.
That we ensure that potential transforms to kinetic.
That we ensure that all we know becomes all we do and eventually who we are.
I think that’s where salvation lies. Like a wheel, our lives will remain on a course or a spot until our “wills” alter them, according to Newton’s first law of motion.
Because sometimes the difference between the present we gripe about and the future we hope for. The gulf between success and failure, life and death, is in; I will do something about what I know.
Now that you know this, don’t lay up this knowledge in a storehouse where dust and moths can rot; put it to work.
Begin today with a decision, and continue with an action.
I know you enjoyed this post. Be kind enough to buy me coffee
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