Day 319: Knowledge earned
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Some knowledge is given freely – commonsense, communication; the kind of stuff children need.
Some knowledge is taken – the knowledge you might’ve missed as a child which you now realise you need.
Then there is the knowledge you earn; the knowledge you can only gain by asking someone who earned it before you. The knowledge comes not in the earning, not in the questioning, but in accepting what is passed to you and making your own sense of it.
For me, the notion of earned knowledge is acutely prevalent in the children of first and second-generation immigrants who are trying to reconnect with their cultural heritage. I don’t know where it leads as it’s a journey I’m still on. But some days, it’s hard to figure out why I’m still here.
Of course, I know “why” I’m still here. I just wonder if they’ll one day start asking the same questions I’m asking.
About today’s photo: I used to think these kinds of photos were nothing to write home about. Now, I see something slightly more nuanced that I want to explore. It’s been sitting in front of me all along, yet I chose not to see it until now.
At certain times in our lives, we all start looking for the origins of ours selves, how we come to be who we are today, and, tracing back to the ancestries is only a part of the answer to this question, the bigger question is to dig deeper into our own pasts and hold that objective view over what had happened to us growing up, and that to me, was the most difficult part.