For a long time, one of the defining activities of my life has been collecting little facts: I never really grew out of that “show-and-tell” mindset that defined us all as children. There’s nothing I like more than submerging myself in a subject area for a couple of weeks, grabbing as many stories as I can, and then turning to my friends and saying, “Did you know …”
If this makes me sound insufferable, it’s because I probably am, but at least I make up for it by providing little anecdotes about the life of Ludwig von Köchel, the man who invented the system for organising the music of Mozart (he was also an accomplished botanist). It doesn’t even really matter what the area of interest is. Over the course of a couple of weeks this year, I read back to back biographies about Malcolm X before discovering the Swedish band Bob Hund, who sing exclusively in a language I don’t speak, and who I could now deliver a short-ish university lecture on, if anyone was interested (my email’s available on my website).
The reason for these scattershot research areas is because I am not really addicted to acquiring knowledge, though that’s a nice bonus. I am addicted, rather, to the high of realising just how much I don’t know. The thrill that drives me happens before I buy the biography or delve into the article. It’s the thrill of coming face-to-face with my own ignorance and watching the horizons of the world suddenly and dramatically expand. In short: when I realise I don’t have a clue, the landscape of my life gets bigger.
For some time, I thought this high was exclusively to be found in bookish pursuits. And then I started to run.
Running tends to get characterised as an entirely physical pursuit, which is probably why I avoided it for so long. But although I can feel drastic changes in my body since I started running pretty much every day, much more notable are the ways it has drawn me into closer acquaintance with my own mind: with my own ignorance.
Almost every single run, there comes a point when I think to myself, I literally cannot run any more. That point shifts deeper into the run every single time, but it does always come. I’m not sure I’ll ever really be able to escape it. It’s as inevitable as death or taxes and it has the sort of grim, insisting finality of both. When the thought hits me, it feels absolute, and every single muscle in my body says time to stop then, I guess.
But, almost immediately, another thought invariably creeps into my head. It says: I bet you can keep going. And suddenly I am filled with the realisation that what I had previously considered true is not; that I spend a lot of life unaware not only of vast swathes of beauty and research that are only a book away but also of my own capabilities. Because time after time, I can keep running.
We do not live in a world where ignorance is well regarded. It’s often described as the reason why the world is shifting dangerously towards the far right; for our growing societal callousness. Furthermore, in the age of AI, everyone is expected to have the answer for everything; to be completely informed on every matter. But if there’s one thing that running has taught me, it’s that certainty not only shrinks the world: it can also resemble a kind of death. If you are certain that you cannot run, you will not run.
By contrast, saying, “I don’t know” is not a failure. It’s a way of gesturing out to a horizon that goes on forever: picking a point in the distance of total, supreme knowledge that, thankfully, we will never actually be able to reach. A point that, if we want to, we can run towards every single day, the sound of a Swedish rock band ringing in our ears.