To Be Another

Dear Me,

Never cease to wonder, to explore, to learn. Never cease the desire to understand.

As a child of curiosity and wonder, Novelist Zadie Smith constantly imagined what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends.

“I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.”

Acquire by Purpose

Dear Me,

Do you ever look back in astonishment of how much more you now know than you did a year previous? Have you ever taken the time to recollect just how much you have learned in that period of time? All the levels, the depths and heights and breadths of knowledge and of learning, acquired from conversation, by observing, through reading, in experiencing. Now, how extraordinary that learning might be if we were to harness it, to direct it, and to focus it on a particular goal or subject.

“A worthy goal for a year
is to learn enough about a subject
so that you can’t believe
how ignorant you were
a year earlier.”

-Kevin Kelly