Knowledge is power
I’ve been journaling since I was 13-years old. That’s about 32 years’ worth of journal-writing that says almost nothing. I’m not judging really. I’m just saying. They really say nothing.
I’m listening to a book by Jim Kwik, the memory guru, called Limitless. It’s about memory and being smarter, with personal growth tips that can’t be ignored if we want to excel in anything from recalling names to memorizing 18-minute TED speeches. Jim Kwik says I can learn to read at least a book a week AND remember what it said. And only recently has that sounded intriguing.
For a while I quit reading and journaling because I said I “didn’t want to be in my head.” It was too hard to know stuff and not be able to apply it. So, it just sat there. Nowhere to go. I’m talking for years I checked out. My learning and writing was very limited. Those were the squandered years, I call them. Not to be too self-deprecating, because I did the best I could. But they were years, I’d say, God did not use me.
You know the story self-help experts tell about a stone-cutter chipping away with tiny taps of the mallet, and then upon one small strike, the stone finally breaks? That’s the story Jim Kwik related to me today in Chapter 6. And just in time! Because I’m earning a Master’s degree, and it is my supreme desire to be really, really smart at something. And not just smart, but powerful. Knowledge, he says is not power. The application of knowledge to make positive changes in the world is powerful.
I’m back to writing, and writing nonsense, and writing stories, and writing dreams, and building word pictures as much and as many as I can. I jot notes in my phone, in documents, on notepads, on sticky pads on my bathroom mirror. Every page of a book… Every journal article… Every musing… Even the squandered years… A tap on the stone and all of it matters. All of it is indeed not just swirling in a dead-end brain, but it’s going somewhere.
If I have faith in anything, it is the faith that God has some purpose for me. A purpose that is all mine. And although there are some very dark days when I believe nothing I did will be of any use, I always end up returning to this crucial conviction. All of it matters. Learn. Do. Experience. Fail. Succeed. Ponder. Imagine. None of it is nothing.
