Sincerity: On the unimportance of cool and the coming back around of reasoning
Warning: this is one of those things where I talk about myself a lot. Beware of excessive use of the words “I”, “me”, “my”, “self” and various combinations thereof.
It must have been around fourth or fifth grade when I got the notion in my head that I was gaining more knowledge and getting smarter as I got older. I remember at first thinking about it in terms of grades. For example, when I was in the fourth grade, I would think to myself, “Man, I really thought I had it figured out back when I was in the third grade, but now that I’m in fourth grade I can see that I really knew very little in those days, and only now that I am in the fourth grade have I really attained any level of wisdom.” And then the same thought for the next few school years, until at some point that I can’t quite pin down, I seem to recall noticing a pattern to these little revelations. I realized that every year I felt a bit smarter, and I wondered if I would keep on feeling this way for every grade I reached. Would I perhaps feel even smarter the next year than I did at that present moment? “Could it be,” I probably whispered to my young self in a private moment, “that perhaps even now in the eighth grade” or whenever it was, “even now there is more I have to learn about the ways of the world?”
Indeed I did, and there it was, one of the most important lessons that I think anyone can ever learn: that even though you might be smarter than you were a year or a week or a minute ago, you’re not anywhere near knowing everything, you never will know everything, and you can always keep on learning. You get older, and if you’re paying any attention at all, you figure some new things out…or rather they are revealed to you, sometimes over time, sometimes in crushing instantaenous bursts.
I had an interesting illustration of all this stuff the other day. Ash and I were driving home from somewhere. We turned on to the street leading into our ‘hood. Ahead of us, we saw a bunch of kids standing out in the street outside the elementary school playground. They were all goth-punk-metal-hey-I-stole-some-smokes-from-my-dad looking kids and it looked like they were up to something, and as we drove closer we saw what it was. A squirrel had been hit by a car, its corpse lay rotting in the street, and these kids had decided it would make a cool photography project. One of the girls was pointing a camera at it, and it looked like a few of her friends were pointing and offering suggestions for what would make the most badassest dead squirrel picture ever taken. Ash and I, upon recognition of these kids, rolled our eyes and laughed. Not that we recognized these particular kids, but we knew their type. They dressed maybe a bit differently back then, but we remembered them. We went to school with them, hung out with them. Hell, we were them sometimes, bored and looking for something to do, why not something weird like photo a dead squirrel or, oh I don’t know, steal newspaper dispensers or chairs from fast food restaurants. Whatever. Those kids and their squirrel were funny.
I thought about those kids a few days later. I was in the car and a Pink Floyd song came on, I don’t remember which one, and it made me think about being in college and sitting in somebody’s dorm room with Pink Floyd just blaring and everybody sitting around just in awe of how cool it all was and how “deep” our flow of conversation felt to us and how I really felt like I was starting to figure out what it was all about. We felt like we were really tapping into something deep and important. And the memory caused me to laugh at myself, that 20-something college self of mine who thought he knew stuff. Big important stuff. I laughed the way I had laughed at those kids and their squirrel, the way my fifth grade self who felt so wise and all-knowing would have laughed at the memory of my fourth grade self. I was just laughing at how cool I thought I was back in those days, how cool those kids probably felt doing something kind of weird and oddly rebellious in a this-would-totally-freak-our-parents-out kind of way. And in the middle of laughing at how uncool all these things now seemed through my nearly 30 year old eyes, I just remembered, so what? It might seem kind of silly now, but it was fun at the time, and who knows? Maybe we really were tapping into something deep and important. As a matter of fact, I think maybe we were, and maybe I’d do well to remember it rather than just always rolling my eyes and laughing. And those kids, I can guarantee those kids were having a great time, and in a few years maybe one of them will dig out that photograph and remember how stupid they all were and laugh.
