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ashley's picture

Wonderings as a Ball O' Yarn

I'd like to go back and address a topic we discussed before the break. The basic question of 'why don't we stop trying to figure it out...?' was brought up in a classmate's post, which to me brought the idea of ignorance as bliss. There are those who question every little thing and want answers for every minute detail of life, while there are others who prefer to leave those unanswerable questions alone and just go on their daily lives without these daunting questions looming overhead. In some situations, the blissfulness of ignorance may seem best, eliminating any internal turmoil. What happens when we ask questions is that we get some answers; what happens when we open our eyes to our surroundings and become involved is that we find out things that may be unpleasant. These findings in turn lead us to having an endless bounty of questions.

If we aren't living in ignorance, we are continuously becoming aware of more things, and the more we know, the more things seem complicated. There is a line in a song by Michael Franti (Say Hey) that speaks to this, in which he states that "it seems like everywhere I go, the more I see the less I know" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU9naM5L8L4. This song, although it doesn't directly speak to the initial question, popped into my head when we were discussing this in class. It seems an endless cycle, that when one thing is found out, it leads to the development of further wonderments.

I then started visualizing a representation of what we know and what we question. In my mind's eye it was portrayed as a big ball of yarn that we are unraveling and will continue to unravel because we are never satisfied with what we have discovered. But until when does this unraveling continue? Until there is no more left? Ultimately, having no more yarn left to unravel would most likely mean we have found all of our answers, but I don't think that just because it has been laid out in the open, that satisfactory answers have been located. Most things unraveled seem to be left as questions hanging in the air, with each person interpreting it their own way. When and where do we find answers? Are there answers?

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