Knowledge Speaks, But Wisdom Listens

So the title of this blog is one of my favorite quotations. It has been hypothesized that Jimi Hendrix said this, but if my research has done me well, he also got it from someone else, although who that person is remains a mystery. The originator isn't nearly as important as the meaning of the quote itself. The idea is that what you already know, you can say (Knowledge speaks). What have you have yet to understand, comprehend, and gain in this world can only come from listening (Wisdom listens). If you were to speak you would be divulging your own knowledge, which of course you already know, and you would not picking up any new knowledge.

To get new knowledge you must listen, but listening is only half the battle. It is like knowing how to add numbers, but never really using it to solve a calculation (sorry, math analogies come very easy to me these days). Wisdom comes from understanding that the build-up of your knowledge might have a theme, a pattern, a main idea if you will. Yet we are to quick to amass our knowledge into a pre-packaged theme that you might find in a fortune cookie or a Hallmark card. We rarely let the theme show itself or work itself out, and rather we are quick to label and judge our experiences and then further categorize them. I find this strikingly humorous, sad, and endearing all in one. It represents a perennial flaw of mine and yours - impatience.

I don't really have answers for you, but I do wonder how we work on not being impatient when the whole world is trying to get things to us faster, sleeker, and smoother. From 3G networks to Wikipedia to Google, we do have a knack for getting what we want exactly when we want it, and in some ways that's beautiful. To think that we can figure things out so quickly and have access to unlimited information - what other generation can say that? To simply be able to read in this day and age allows you to be a scholar. True, you would be standing on the shoulders of giants who researched things earlier, but that is no real matter, we all stand on the shoulders of giants for our own great epiphanies and gains. Yet we all wonder whether this double edged sword of unlimited information, and coming at you at fast speeds, will tilt us into a generation of doers or dreamers. A generation of listeners or creators. I myself wonder at how it will cause us to reflect.

Some of the greatest reflections people of older generations had was working/searching for something so long and finally finding it. Yet we do not need to reflect on what a search has done for us as humans because our searches only last .003 seconds. Imagine someone back in the day searching for a lost journal entry from World War II or perhaps they were going to a new land to look for gold - either way the search remains the same - these people looking for something with no hope that they will find it - perhaps they alienate their family, perhaps they learn something about themselves, either way - good or bad something happens to them, because they gained some wisdom in their search because they spent a lot of time listening. We, however, are stuck in speaking our own knowledge. We want something, we find it (anonymously, perhaps with no human interaction whatsoever), and then we grab it, get it, make it our own, and boom - we're back in our bubbles, enjoying our own things without having to find new ones. It's the fact that people had to do things before that makes it so weird. If we wanted to have an adventure we could, but we would have to CHOOSE it. And when you have a La-Z-Boy chair, air conditioning, and great options for playing any sort of media, it's a pretty easy choice to not venture out. So, I guess in my own babbling, I wonder whether we will continue to get wise, or simply smarter with knowledge but with no real life applications.