What I know

My knowledge sits in a box. Attached to my neck and protected by bone. Mine to open and free to take. Any thought I acquire, ready to be shelved. Except as I walk down the depths of my mind some things are too dark to see.

Sometimes what gets dark, I forget to pick back up. The experiences of infancy, the many breakfasts I ate, the many words I’ve spoken, never to be found again. It’s almost as if my knowledge is not a box at all but a tub with a leak, albeit with a faucet on.

However, my knowledge is not all water. Sometimes what drips in feels different. It remains on the surface never mixing. In fact, my knowledge takes many forms from water, to oil, to gas, to air, to rocks, to people. My knowledge is not a chalice to be filled but a vibrant mix of many conflicting contradictions ill-posed to be interchangeable. Each thought fighting for space trying to survive before their eventual decay. A competition where only the fittest survive. My mind is a market of ideas.

In their ruthless expansion sometimes my ideas cooperate, finding ways to survive together where one cannot. Sometimes my ideas resonate and give birth to something brand new. My knowledge is not the sum of the ideas but the collective whole of interactions of it’s parts. My knowledge is an ecosystem, competing, cooperating, coexisting, and contradicting.

My knowledge is vast because it is an ocean, a forest, a sky, a tree, a house, a friend. My knowledge is my niche in space and time. Knowledge doesn’t fit in a box, a tub, a market, a hard drive, or a brain. Knowledge is the world in which I live. Living is to know.