Is Ignorance Really Bliss? (pt1)
If knowledge is power.
And ignorance is bliss.
What is knowing?
I’ve been thinking a lot about an interaction that I had today. About finding out something about someone that changed my way of seeing them. And what I learned was no recent development. I had just never come into knowing it until that moment.
And then I became amazed that they had become, in a way, a different person to me without them even being there. Between the last time that I saw them and the next time that I do – they changed to me.
How can I take someone that I ‘know’. Discover something already known by them, something that they have been living… And have them change right in front of my eyes?
Are they not the same person that I was just looking at?
By the omission of that knowledge, they had been different before now. Maybe I was just filling in the gaps, really ever only given a broad essence of a person.
"Nothing is different, but everything has changed"
Ignorance may not always be bliss, but it definitely changes the way that we measure things.
But why are we measuring things at all?
What is knowing someone really? Or maybe knowing is not the right word. Maybe rather, how do we view or understand another person?
There is a difference in the way that we define people who we met as kids and those that we meet later in life.
Knowing people as an adult has a lot more to do with who’ve they’ve become than who they really are.
The older we get, the more we shape our interpretation of a person based on their past experiences. We fill in the blanks as to how they became the person that we now see. We justify their actions, find explanations as to why they are the way that they are. We take the information that we have - what they do, where they’ve lived, how they spend their time, what they know, who they know, what they wear, what they fear, how they act, and then we fill in the rest.
And yet as children we knew the person before the events that shaped them. We know them by their, heart and soul, their pure simplicity. When you try to define a sister, a parent, an old friend, you don’t think about where they have lived, what they have done. They didn’t change just because they went to school and learned new things or because they now have different belongings.
We hold onto the true them, who they were before their experiences molded them, shifted them, began to define them. Even after losing touch for years, we do not see them as different person because of the events that occurred during the time apart. We still know them by what is at their core.
So who is person?
They are every instance of themselves that they ever experienced. They are no more their recent self, who they were yesterday, than they are their self from 10, 15, 18 years ago.
And yet none of these are who they are right now.
They are a sum of every form of person that they have ever been and yet, currently, they are no longer any of those people at all.
If we do not notice something, we cannot wonder what it is or anything about it.
Once we see something and we begin explain it, we try to figure out rules as to why it is the way that it is.
And in the case of knowing people…
When we become aware of something previously unknown, we are sometimes hit with congruency issues. A disconnect. This isn't how it is supposed to be.
The new piece of information does not fit into the puzzle in the right way. The image that we had created of them isn’t actually the one that exists. The person that we thought we knew, they never really existed at all.
So perhaps my issue today was all in my head. It was my drawing conclusions about someone that I can never fully know. It was making assumptions based on facts that brought about disappointment.
The fact that I felt that they had changed.
That they are no longer who I thought they were.
That my current reality had become shattered...
… means that I was seeing them in some superficial combination of their concrete face value and the person that concluded that they must be.
Of them, I knew in part and I speculated in part. But of them, I only measured.
I was not seeing that person as who they are. I was only seeing my own image of them. I became lost in an illusion.
And when I take what I have seen of them - instead of what I’ve known of them. When I take them purely for who they’ve always been with me at any point in time…
I really do like the person that they are, that they exist as. The person who was underneath all of that muck that I created.
The veil was lifted.
But it is not the veil that I that I thought it was when I began this post.
My eyes were opened.
But, it was not in the moment that I found out something about them. The moment that shattered my blissful oblivion. The moment of disappointment.
Rather, it was in the moment that I threw away my image of them. The moment that shattered my illusion of knowing. The moment of clarity.
And in this moment of simple awareness - I realize that they never changed at all, I did.
They are simply themselves.
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