401. I Know Nothing

A recent meeting between Nora’s seven-year-old and her uncle reminded her that all of us are still learning every day.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Nora: I’m Nora McInerny, and it’s going to be okay, which is truly, I know, a banana’s thing to say. Everybody lives in this world. You have eyes, you have ears, you drink from the fire hose of absolute misery every time you turn on your TV or pick up your phone. I will never tell you everything is going to be okay.

I don’t know that to be true, and in fact I think that’s kind of a dumb thing to say. I can think, off the top of my head of five or six million things that are not okay and never will be. But I do know that there is something okay in even the worst days. And this podcast is a little bit of a group project, but it is also a reminder to myself and to all of you to try to look for, hunt for the okay in your day.

I think it is the only way we get through. I think it is.  I am going to tell you a story from a trip I took this summer. I took my kids to Wisconsin, small town Wisconsin, La Crosse, Wisconsin to be exact, which I think they would say they’re, they’re, they’re a small city and they’re actually a beautiful small city.

I would love to live in La Crosse, Wisconsin. If the La Crosse tourism board is listening to this and they want me, a person of moderate success and  If, if they’re looking for a woman like me to come move to La Crosse and live in one of those giant mansions that are still there, I’m talking at what my kids call a three layer house.

They have houses with turrets, honest to God, turrets in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I almost don’t want to tell you this because I like Wisconsin, La Crosse, Wisconsin so much and I don’t want.  anyone else to move there and buy up all the mansions with tourists and Carriage houses. I don’t, but I do because I want that city to thrive.

You see what kind of a conundrum we’re in? Anyways, I took my kids to La Crosse, Wisconsin to visit my family. My dad’s sister lives there. My dad’s brother lives there. There really are only four remaining siblings from my father’s family of 10 children. That’s a doozy that I’ve not said out loud, but the show’s called, it’s going to be okay.

Not, it’s going to be depressing. Let’s all confront our mortality. So anyways, I take my kids to visit my aunt and uncle. They’re not married. They’re siblings. I don’t know why you care. And, My uncle is a philosopher. He’s an honest to goodness philosopher. This is a man who was, was excited to tell me that he got a new computer and that he didn’t have the vocabulary to say  Bluetooth, you know, but he was like, and it doesn’t even need wires, Nora.

And I said, wow, what a miracle. And he said, can you believe it? This is a man who doesn’t use the internet. Don’t show him the internet. Keep his brain pure. Keep him just, he’s so beautiful and lovely and he’s such a deep thinker and he didn’t have a lot of time to hang out with us because he’s an active philosopher.

Okay. He had thoughts to think. And, and none of them involved hearing about Roblox from my children, which is fine, but he is one of my children’s namesakes. My child had not met him yet. I was like, you gotta, you gotta meet this man that I named you after.  My kid is seven. He is so lovely, like all little seven year olds are.

And he was so excited to meet the man that he was named for, like he could not believe his luck. So he gets there and he, uh. Again, I was talking to my uncle and my uncle tells him that he is, um, you know, a philosopher or maybe I said that and my son said, well, what’s philosophy? And he said, well, you know, he did leads him right into etymology and he’s like, you know, uh, so, so, so Sophia is, is knowledge and Phylos is love.

So it’s the love of, it’s the love of knowledge. It’s the love of knowledge, my child. And my kid is like, Oh my God, my sister’s name is Sophia. Like he just can’t, he’s like, what? Oh, his mind is blown. He’s like, you know, he’s learning root words and drinking a Coke. And he says to my uncle, you must know everything because my uncle is he has that air about him, you know, he’s wearing a, a suit with a, with a jacket.

It’s 90 degrees in July in humid Wisconsin. He’s still dressed. Okay. This is a man who dresses and he dresses for dinner and he just looks wise. And he just explained the word philosophy to a seven year old and my kid says, you must know everything. And my uncle says,  Oh no,  I know nothing.  I know nothing.

And I thought, man, oh man,  do I need to remind myself of that? Do I need to remind myself that actually my job on this earth is not to know everything or pretend as though I do, but to acknowledge that there is a great amount that I do not know. And that my job here is to simply try to understand and uncover and pursue without  resting in my favorite resting position, which is rightness.

I love being right. Oh my God, I love being right. I love being right. And really  all my uncle is doing  in, in, in all of his philosophy is.  And expressing that love of knowledge and that pursuit of knowledge while also acknowledging  the fact that he does not know anything. He doesn’t know anything and I was like, yeah, you do.

Come on now. Like yes, you do. Yes, you do He’s like, no, I really don’t I really don’t I just uh, I certainly don’t know everything. I know nothing I was so struck by that I wrote it on a post it that I’m pointing to even though you can’t see it because this is audio. I wrote I know nothing Hoping to get that through my skull because we are also in an era of and a time in history.

Maybe we’ve always been like this. I don’t know. I’m only, you know, 40 some years old. I, I, I, I, I don’t know how humanity has always been, but it feels like we are in an era of like, of definite rightness and wrongness and really needing to get the upper hand on one another. And what if, what if that wasn’t the point?

What if the point was to acknowledge all that we don’t know and stay curious?