Somewhere there is the point at which life turns into death. Loss of blood, for example, takes one towards that point. And recently I was taken closer to that point on the occasion of a nose bleed. Because I am taking warfarin (to reduce the possibility of a a DVT following surgery last year) the nosebleed was reluctant to stop. So it was necessary to volunteer a trip to the nearby pronto soccorso, the A & E here in Italy, to experience the distinctly uncomfortable intervention of tampons being stuffed into my nasal cavities. Losing blood, on this occasion mostly swallowed, takes one towards the sense of the danger of losing ones life, it flows out (or in) with the blood. In the following days there were a couple of times I nearly fainted. I felt weak, I vomited blood: where was I on the thread between life and death?
The most interesting bit of life is between knowing and not knowing. It’s the heart of the matter. The most interesting aspect of education/learning is, again, between knowing and not knowing. If I know everything there is nothing more to do, nothing more to explore; life, we might say, has come to an end.
Of course, each of us will have a view on where on the life/death line or knowing/not knowing line we would prefer to be, and how much movement we can sustain. How far can I go into not knowing? The popularity of extreme sports suggest that there are many of us who want to explore that tension and many of us who prefer to explore it via stories, movies, documentaries.
My last post was about the door; then it came along . . .
