It is a part of the human desire to know and want to know. From the simplest act of conversing, humans have the tendency to crave information. These acts take the trivial forms of daily gossip with friends, meeting someone new and finding the urge to know them better, talking to your significant other and coveting to know their days, and more. Human nature is molded to question and absorb every possible piece of everything. We are creatures made of bricks of everything we know.
I find it choking whenever I have yet to figure something out. I have this morbid desire to know and learn everything: a longing to consume all knowledge there is inside of me. I do this not out of competition, but purely out of personal enjoyment; the enlightening feeling of knowing, of learning, of being curious.
To add to this, to me, being curious is not a shameful deed. It is a sign from the soul that our bodies are capable of something more; it craves something new, fresh, and striking. And we must feed these cravings. With all of our hearts and will and power, we must feed these cravings.
These cravings come up to me whenever I find a new interest, whether it is a book, a certain academic subject, a culture, a movie, or a TV show. I try to find a way to feed them, to let them grow in me, to let them engulf my whole being. These expressions might seem exaggerated, but to me, everything I love always touches my bones and soul, and I will do everything to let them flourish in me.
I want to be disgustingly educated in everything. But what is it that is stopping me? To learn, you must consume first. But I find it hard to consume without being consumed. I cannot seem to concentrate on the blurry lines between necessary learning and unnecessary consumption. I want to read all the books there are. Sometimes I even find it frustrating that I cannot find a new strand of life in every book, every book that I wish to read but have not the time to. So many books, so many things to learn from, but not enough time. And if learning is consuming, where does my time for creating lie? I am just a human after all, a human with limited time and ability to absorb everything.
I feel it in my flesh when Sylvia Plath, the mother of the fig tree analogy, expressed this very feeling in her journal:
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
I tend to have a suppressed irritation that books take too long to finish, for I wish I could hold them in my palm and absorb its magic straight into my head, giving me all the information I wish to know; giving me every vision of Dostoevsky, Wilde, Camus, Plath, Woolf, all in one grasp; I want to scan a book and know what Nietzsche and Kafka think of a particular subject. But this is where my mind contradicts itself: where is the joy of reading books if not in the process of it?
So I took one step at a time, giving myself a chance to find delight in the process of consuming everything. For it is one to note that instantaneous knowledge is not a knowledge to take pride in. Every breath taken is not a time wasted; it is a form of consolation that we still have time. So take one breath at a time, one knowledge at a time, one book at a time, and let them grow sprouts in your souls.