What's worth knowing?

What's worth knowing now? How much do we have to read about what's happening in the world?

How much do we have to know about the future before we can start to be part of it?

Very little.


We were all trained in school to have a view of education that consisted (yes, I'm generalizing) of scattered bits of info about the world out there. Scattered because the learning was in different subject areas. A smattering of "larning" from that time remains with me, but the odd hodge-podge of factoids and tidbits that I remember have litte to do with subjects that were taught in the order that they were. What I remember were details that I'd "incorporated", taken into my own body of knowldge for some reason that, while not conscious, was uniquely my own.

I mention this because I'm wondering how much what we read daily, whether in the relatively enlightend world of the information web, or absorb from mainstream media, really comes out of the same model of learning that informed (or misinformed as the case may be) our school years. Thoughts that "meander like a restless wind inside a letter box," as John Lennon had it.

What's it for, in other words, what I'm learning about? A case in point for me, is the continuing boondoggle in the European financial markets. Quite a while ago I understood that they're going down, that there'll be multiple defaults, sooner or later, and that the contagion will spread. I know this for myself now. Why study the day to day procrastinations and fumbling pretense that it's just a bad case of hiccups? I do read about them, and track them on the radio, but I've not learned much new doing so in quite a while. I remain sure as I can be that the reality check is on the way, in the mail as it were. I didn't know the timing back then and I don't it now.

One could say I should be willing to consider I might be wrong, keep an open mind. But an open mind can be a made up mind. The world really is more like round than flat. People who've made up their minds don't change them because of reevaluations of complex data. They skim complex data to prove they're right or they study it in detail to prove they're right. People making up their minds can explore data with some rigor and some do.

For me, I read "disaster porn" for titillation and entertainment only, like junk food. I'm weaning myself off it though. It's part of my world but a diminishing part. The big picture is enough, is better.

The real nutrition comes from another direction entirely than stuffing more current affairs into the maw. Current affairs in the case of the mainstream media highlights this case: discussions don't consider the central issues except tangentially, never head on. The fact that real issues are mentioned at all gives the mainstream media credibility and keeps us buying in. It's like the inclusion of occasional dissenters to give the sense of hipness and relevance. Long as they don't take a hard look at the structure of media, rather than bathe in its content. Leftish media doesn't see the structure of media either, but that's another post.

No, the real nutrition comes from exploring and developing and creating something that's new for you, really new. Something alive and burning. Poet David Whyte said (or quoted someone, I'm not sure) that the poet is somone who overhears something he doesn't want to know. We all overhear that something.  If we're willing to bring it forward, it's something that comes out of your the place where your heart's imagination meets the world's imagination, something that's emerging and powerful and necessary for you. That thing, whatever it is, brings life and power to the world and to you. It saves you. If it stays hidden it festers and becomes anxiety. It goes off like sour yoghurt. It goes off but part of its nature is that whenever you find your way back to it, it's there, whole and entire, not a mark on it. And it's sweet.

To know that thing that is your small part of the whole body of knowledge, is what's worth knowing. Your working on it and finding a way to bring it forward gives life and contributes to the whole, however long it takes, however hard it is.

The story now, in the world and in us, is a story of change. It's evolution in real time. I don't know how it's going to work out in the details, not at all. But I do know the big direction of the outer change: it's toward more local resource use and more local community.

But everyone who finds their way into the story of change will discover, I think, as I do, that the change is really about them, about a change they need to make for themselves, something that connects their imagination to the larger imagination. We can do this.