The History Of Understanding
I always thought that there was one thing everyone else but I knew, as if I had missed a day of school in third grade when they handed out the instructions on how to handle life and then spent the rest of the time at a disadvantage without quite understanding what that one thing the rest of them had been told was. With every setback or disappointment I had an even more fervent belief that once I finally figured out what that one thing was that everyone else understood it all would fall into place for me. As I grew older I began to realize that everyone had that one thing too, and it was different for each person. But when I ultimately understood that there was a complete cartload of things that I didn’t understand, and that I never would, and that it didn’t really matter because I had already come this far and at the end of it there wasn’t some kind of gold watch or statue but just the ineffable indifference of the universe testifying to my ultimate insignificance, I finally figured out that none of it really mattered and that I had actually understood the way it all worked the whole time. And then I understood that, uh oh, I was probably missing something important.
