The price of knowledge
In a society based on transactional currency, a price can be put on everything... and it is.
So, how do you quantify the price of knowledge? And no, I’m not talking about the cost of a degree, a graduate certificate, or even a book.
I’m talking about the knowledge you slowly acquire along your journey—knowing what makes you happy, sad, melancholic, and drives you forward.
Now, you see that the idea of putting a price tag on something like this becomes a much bigger challenge. You could argue that it isn’t even quantifiable. But perhaps, we’re looking at this the wrong way. What if it’s the other way around?
I’ve increasingly been thinking, for decades now, that knowledge sets the price.
Every notion you gather, every single discovery you make, comes with a cost. The cost might be different from individual to individual and may vary based on a variety of factors. Such factors can be age, location, current emotional state—you get the idea.
Imagine this: you discover you have a terminal illness and only have a few months left in this world. How much does that cost you? Maybe you would have preferred to stay in denial and blissfully live every single moment in ignorance.
But would you really have lived every minute of that time? I bet you would have spent the last few months, weeks, and days doing exactly the same thing, day in and day out—not realising that the only thing in your life that is infinite is the feed of your social media that you scroll through every day.
On the other hand, knowing—as hard and brutal as it can be in such a situation—can prepare you.
It can prepare everyone around you, allow you to make amendments for yourself, and enable you to take in every single minute of that precious time you have been wasting. You don’t know, but you’ve been wishing it away. Another costly mistake.
I say whatever price knowledge asks, it’s worth paying. Don’t ask questions. Just do it, because after all, you can’t argue with knowledge. You can try, but it’s a lost battle—trust me, I lose daily.
Sit there, take it in, be humbled.
Feel sorry for everyone else who doesn’t understand humility and will never realise how good it feels to be menial to knowledge.
What’s happening to me? Why do I feel compelled to write this? I’m not a writer, and yet, for some reason, I’m here. This is my sixth session. I’ve been doing it almost daily, and despite being new, it feels like nothing new at all. There is a slight delay between my thoughts and the keystrokes—minor, probably less than a quarter of a second, but I notice it. I notice it because it’s not there when I draw. The whole experience is totally different.
Drawing, in comparison to writing, is a little slower.
When I draw, the image is there in my mind. Sometimes it’s static. Other times it’s dynamic and evolving as the drawing takes shape. Writing is more like a stream of thoughts escaping my mind, and I try to do my best to catch them. Just like drawing with a marker, there is no coming back.
That’s the approach I’ve been taking with writing. Sure, I correct something when I mistype, but that’s about it. No rephrasing or rewording; I just roll with it and read it at the end.
When I read it back, I get mixed feelings. Part of me wants to go in and edit, polish, add, and fix things. The other part of me wants to preserve what I did, leave it the way it is—the way I put it down, almost to commemorate that very writing session. I would have never thought I could spend an hour sitting here and writing, let alone experiencing emotions.
It’s such a lonely act, but yet I don’t feel alone—quite the opposite. I’ve written before, many times in my life, as you would expect. It’s different, though, when you sit down to write something that isn’t connected to anything you must or have to do.
I wrote before because of assignments, work tasks. Well, now that I think about it, I did express myself in writing before. It was to externalise my feelings for K in a more traditional and old-fashioned way. Letters are so good. So are paintings, and so are songs!
These last few weeks have shown me how much I missed artistic expression.
You can find art in everything you do and everything you see. Why have I been blind to it? Perhaps it was more deafness. I couldn’t hear it—probably too much noise, so much disturbance that it drowned it out.
As I’m writing about deafness, Beethoven comes on—so timely! More proof that you can still compose a majestic opera even though you can’t hear, because it all starts in your mind. The art is there. Then it’s up to the person to bring it to life with the knowledge they have.
I wonder what Beethoven’s inspiration would have looked like through the mind and brush of a talented painter. The same identical idea, but in the hands of two distinct artists.
Can one idea be truly identical if it’s placed in two different minds? How do you even plant an idea or spark of inspiration in someone’s mind without altering it? Sure, you could present it in different forms—a fruit, a tree, or a model—and the artist draws inspiration from those. But inspiration creates ideas, so that won’t solve it…