When I graduated from high school, many of my classmates worked that phrase into their yearbook quotes, but I regarded that as a kind of suck-up gesture, and it was far beneath my teen aged dignity.

So I say it now, belated, because it took more time for me to grasp what I had to be thankful for, and to let go of some resentments I harbored.

Like pieces of my own True Cross, these resentments were tokens of sacrifice that I suppose I believed would buy my way into some heaven or another, but only if I could arrive at the door of that heaven with the memory and the pain still fresh.

So I picked the scabs of my wounds, turning small cuts into dramatic wounds, just as now I pick at the scab of my self delusion.  Bad habit. Let's move on.

I was a curious child. I asked question after question, each answer revealing the next question. I wanted to know everything.  I kept expecting, as I recall, that the whys and wherefores would eventually narrow down to some sort of First Cause, and that if I asked enough questions, I could get to, as it were, the trunk of the tree of knowledge: the big meaty part which held up all the rest and gave it shape.*

What I kept finding instead was that each answer unlocked more questions, and more and more and more.  The more I learned, the more I came to realize how much I did not know.  People who pursue knowledge for the sake of ego often have a problem with this.  It can make you crazy to work so hard to be smarter and it only underscores how dumb you really are.  I reckon that's why people adopt Faiths like Christianity or Pop Science: it allows them to place arbitrary limits on the scope of the universe they are willing to imagine and subjectively live in.  Once  "All Possible Truth" has been limited and circumscribed by the Holy Bible or a 1972 physics text or "what my mama tole me" or any of these other handy dandy experience chokers, then it's possible to believe you know most of what there is to know, have a good grasp of "reality."  This sounds so intellectually infantile, like really believing stars are pinholes in the curtain of the night because real astronomy makes you feel small.  But I saw just as much of this self-referencial idiocy in academia as I did working on farms and construction sites.

Mere intelligence is not enough to avoid this trap. It takes Wisdom.  Wisdom is like a stick. On one side of this stick is written "...and You Really Don't Know..." On the other side is written "...and That's OK..."  What you do is you beat yourself over the head with this stick, morning, noon, and night, until Wisdom Comes.  Then you are allowed to stop.  Try this.

If you don't do it to yourself, life will do it to you, and that is worse.
 

*Interesting metaphor, this. This supposed "trunk of the tree of knowledge" is like the Lingam Erect, or a kind of yang unchanging. It would lead to a tap root, following it on down, which is the Lingam plunged into the Yoni of the Earth. So the Root would be yang changing. Going back the other way, the leaves on the tree are yin: receptive of light and moved by wind, but changing and falling in their season, so yin changing. Yin unchanging is the Earth itself, and yet the Earth is the source of the change of dead matter to fertilizer and food and thence to more living matter, and so the Earth is the Cauldron of regeneration and Earth's Magick is to turn death back into life.  For a total parallel, the tree trunk, yang unchanging, would also have to be some sort of secret source of change energy... and guess what, it is:  the wood of the tree is burned for Fire, the changing energy opposite that of the Earth.  Interesting thing about earth and fire is that where earth makes dead matter come back to life through decay, fire only burns the carcasses of formerly living matter, like wood or oil, which can only be produced by living things, and turns it into smoke and ash...  Now you know what it's like in my head.