When I was a pre-teen, and then a teenager, a phrase was bandied about quite frequently: “you learn something new every day!” We would say this when we were struck by some new, sometimes sordid, sometimes perplexing, piece of information. Something we hadn’t known before.
As teens, as kids in general, really, you get used to knowing that you don’t know everything. That there is a whole world out there to learn. Not knowing something isn’t bad, certainly nothing to be ashamed of, and so we would–half-jokingly, half-astonished–say that line: you learn something new every day.
I am now forty years old, and I learned something new today. But before I say what I learned, I just want to think for a moment about learning, and about how we present ourselves. For instance, I rarely see any of my peers talk about or discuss something we don’t know about. We talk about things we DO know about. We talk about things that are within our particular purview or profession, but we don’t seem too keen to learn something new. We all seem to want to talk to a room full of people who know the same things we do, who are intellectually aligned. And there is something to that: I love talking about things I know about, because it gives me a certain sense of ease, a power. I find it difficult, as I imagine most of my friends do, to admit when I don’t know something. Admitting that you don’t know a thing is tricky: you don’t want to appear uninformed or dumb, you don’t want to be ridiculed, but you also don’t want to make the mistake of pretending knowledge, lest your ignorance be called out. I don’t like the feeling I get from a lot of interactions these days, namely, the “I know everything” vibe. Meaning many people I know suddenly seem to know, well, everything.
If we were being truly honest about what we truly know–real facts of history, or health, or art, or literature–we would have to grant that a large majority of our “knowledge” is reached for via Google. That we might know a portion of a thing, but not the whole. That if we talked in person, with no phone around to check our facts or to summon a name we can’t remember, we might have something to learn–whether from a person we are with or just as a note-to-self to go home and research a subject. I think that is a good place to be. I like to think of it like this: if I was abducted by an alien, how much would I really be able to tell them about a lightbulb and how it works? Or about the music of Mozart?
When I think about high school, I think about my hand raising. Whenever I didn’t understand, my hand went up. Whenever I had a differing view of a topic, my hand went up. I didn’t have the patience or the introversion required for me to wait to see if someone else would ask the question I wanted to know. I just knew I didn’t know, or didn’t agree, or didn’t have enough information, and so my hand would rise up, a flag or a beacon, a vulnerable, hungry thing,
So many people say “teenagers act like they know everything.” I have been around teenagers. For the most part, that’s pretty true. But the key word is “act.” They are acting like they know at the same time they realize they don’t know. They are trying on the clothes of adulthood, that future they see just around the corner. They think that adults know. That being an adult means knowing all the answers, or at least the majority of them.
But the truth is we do not know everything. The truth is that the more our children see us say we don’t know and then research something, the more likely they are to do the same, as they grow up. If they see us not know something and see us be unashamed about not-knowing, they are less likely to feel ashamed for having to ask for answers themselves.
So, let’s get back to the phrase “you learn something new every day.” As an adult, when was the last time you learned something? And I don’t mean the day’s news of what our president said or did, I mean really learned something? Maybe it was three weeks ago. Maybe it was five months ago. Maybe you can’t remember. When did we decide to stop raising our hands and decide to start acting like we know? Or when did we, without our knowledge, fall into routines of work and life and family and forget to keep learning along the way?
The thing I learned today is not particularly intellectual; it is not tantamount to my well-being, where I live; it is not useful in everyday conversation, nor does it change my life. It is just something I learned today that I didn’t know yesterday: the train tracks in Chicago are lit on fire to prevent malfunctions in the switches in the cold weather. Nothing sexy. Nothing that makes a person feel smarter than another. Just the fact that ropes soaked with kerosene are put on the tracks and set on fire to prevent train tracks from freezing up. I truly did learn something new today.
This moment of learning a technique that prevents train tracks from freezing is just a small thing. But in thinking about it, I realized that it has been quite awhile since I learned something. Of course I read books, I stay abreast of politics, world events, I engage with my community. But I didn’t know about train tracks. I have learned several things from shows that my children watch–learned about vampire squids, dinosaurs, symbiosis. But new knowledge is few and far between on a daily basis. When I heard about the tracks on fire, I vowed to myself to make the offhand comment from my teen years actually be true: learn something new every day! It turns out we adults have a lot to learn. We just have to remember to look for it. To stop pretending that we already know all of it. And to raise our hands, without shame.
