That’s why I got into reading. From a young age, I thought books were the portal to…everything. They had all the answers, and I thought that if I read them all, I could become the smartest person alive. I don’t know why I wanted to know everything. It’s not like I wanted to show off. I didn’t want to know everything to tell people. I guess I just wanted to know…just to know. Just to know I had all the answers. I guess I figured all the answers were out there, but I just needed to go and collect it all, to harvest it.
I suppose I still think books hold the key to everything. I feel like the human experience, the ages and ages of it, have been captured, documented, lived, and relived, by people much smarter than myself. Maybe I want to learn as much as I can from them, so I can live my life wholly and completely, with as much information as I can to make the best decisions possible.
But I guess at some point, there is a fine line between learning from the written, and learning from experience, and it’s hard to know when one stops and when the other one starts. Or at least how much of one stops being helpful and starts becoming detrimental, not allowing you to move forward, to live and experience. I think sometimes the word for that is fear, but I’m not sure that’s exactly the right word for it. It’s sort of the mix between fear, unpreparedness, and irresponsibility. If there was a word that described these feelings, that’s what I would use here.
I don’t know if there was a point, other than to appreciate how amazing books are, but also, that maybe if I do read every book ever written, I may become the smartest person alive, but I may not be the most knowledgeable.
So I Quit My Job and Moved to India 