What I don’t know

Maria Montalvo

Scraps of paper and Post-it Notes and printed images of quotations are strewn about my office, not to mention in notes on my phone and saved to random files on my laptop.

There for me to read of me every time I sit at my desk, I see a card with “Luck is believing you are lucky” from Tennessee Williams and an engraved piece of wood with “The purpose of our lives is to be happy,” from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Those two continuously remind me of how incredibly fortunate I am, and that attitude is at the center of how (contentedly) we exist, despite the hardships and heartbreaks.

Behind my chair is a favorite, “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist,” from Picasso. What better inspiration to navigate the insanity of a world we are trying to maintain some control over.

A few years ago, I wrote one down without a name, and I cannot remember where I heard it, but it resonates much stronger every day: “Nature knows much more than me.” (I found an attribution to a performing artist and beekeeper, Lana Nasser, but I have never heard of her before.)

Modern physics only began to scratch the surface of knowledge in the last century regarding the galaxy and time and how we fit into all of it. One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein had just published his mind-bending new theory of relativity, and decades later, some of it was proven wrong. Early 20th century scientists assumed our Milky Way galaxy was the only one, but by 1924 Edwin Hubble finally got everyone to realize we are but one among many.

Considering how fast we are learning that we have been wrong, why is it people can be so certain they are right and so scared of learning new information?

When the first iceboxes were developed for home use, people questioned whether something was fresh just because it was kept cold. In fact, the U.S. government had to hire several scientists to collect data to prove that people could trust refrigerated products, and now people generally believe everything has to be refrigerated to maintain freshness, even things that do not need it.    

Author’s fun fact: Just in the past month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Refrigerator Freedom Act 2024 to prohibit the Secretary of Energy from prescribing or enforcing any energy conservation standards for refrigerators, refrigerator-freezers, and freezers. Freedom for your icebox, no matter how much ozone-destroying coolant it may be spewing.

We have seen how an unfettered drive for growth and convenience has impacted our natural resources and quite simply the natural world, and yet we keep waiting for someone to come up with a solution that does not include consuming less.

Americans buy 5 times the amount of clothing we did in 1990 and 60% more than we did just 15 years ago. Our individual energy consumption has doubled since 1960. And do not even think about how much more food we consume than 50 years ago (and thus how much more needs to be produced).

When it comes down to it, there is so little we do know, about how our actions impact the environment. There is so much more to learn about science, about ourselves, other than perhaps the one lesson that we relearn daily – our lives have meaning based on those we love and what we appreciate, not what we have.

My collections of quotations and idioms will likely continue to grow, but some sayings are better forgotten. “What you don’t know cannot hurt you” is, well, wrong.