You don’t have to understand everything

Knowledge and limitations

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” - G.K. Chesterton

I forget this simple fact regularly: You don’t have to understand everything right this moment, right now. There are a few ways you could think about this. The first is that we all have “lanes” that fit our unique interests and talents, and you’ve heard people say you should “stay” in yours. While this is sometimes a ploy by difficult people to shoo you off their territory, I think they’re usually right.

I remember hosting an interview show for a TV network back in 2021, and it haunts me how much time and energy I spent interfering in the marketing team's business. Sure, I didn’t like their work, and sure, I still believe I could have done a better promotion of the show than they did (sorry!), but my meddling was taking away from my actual job: writing good interviews and monologues.

I needed to stay in my lane. Focus my energy and comprehension on the area where I have the most experience and responsibility.

“Do not waste the remainder of your life in thoughts about others, when you do not refer your thoughts to some object of common utility. For you lose the opportunity of doing something else when you have such thoughts… It is not enough to think of what you are doing, but also how and why you are doing it.”

- Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 7.19)

The second way to think about this is a little more philosophical. There are things we aren’t meant to fully grasp. If you consider the Book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve in the Torah and Bible, they’re given the job of tending to God’s creation, and I’ve always assumed, “replenishing” the earth. But of course, as this kind of story always goes, they wanted more. Eve wanted knowledge and a full grasp of good and evil.

I’m reading G.K. Chesterton right now; his book from 1908, titled Orthodoxy. He puts words to something we’ve long understood from popular culture, the character of the mad scientist, these people who have gone mad in their effort to make sense of everything. They’ve left no room for wonder and the mystery of unknown things. Their taste for reason, rationality and mathematical certainty takes them off the cliff’s edge.

“Be not curious about things which are beyond your power, for that will only make you unhappy.” - Epictetus (Enchiridion)

Robert M. Pirsig’s bestseller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, touches on this very thing with a lead character who goes mad in college trying to define “quality.” Trying to make formulaic something we all know in our gut….what’s good and what’s less good…is a fast route to madness.

I guess what I want you to think about this week is that you can only do so much in your limited time on this earth. Focus your energy. Manage your time. Spend it on where you have genuine strengths and outsource the rest. Those other things are someone else’s gift, not yours.

While you could call it defeatist, the same goes for knowledge. I hunger for it, but I can only hold so much. Prioritize your reading. If you love an author, read all of their work before moving on.

This will make you not only wiser, but also more effective in the areas where you need to be most sharp.

Have a great week, friends.