Like most writers, I’m a ho for etymology. The juiciest one I found recently? Profane. If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll get some expected definitions: unholy, desecrated, polluted, etc. But the Latinate etymology paints a different story. Pro, meaning before/outside; and fanum, the temple. Through this lens, the word better fits the lesser used definition “not yet holy” or “uninitiated.”
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about lessons. About learning. About temples as places of learning. How profanity is perhaps not too different from ignorance. And how stigmatized we’ve made both.
When I worked at a college, my supervisor often remarked that we needed to normalize ignorance. Her point was this: a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be punished. A lack of knowledge is a thirst to be quenched. A need to be tended. Ignorance should not be dismissed, but embraced. To dismiss perpetuates; to embrace quells.
I’m beginning to suspect that an unwillingness to learn (or to teach) holds more danger than a status of unknowing. Perhaps the true bliss of ignorance is that you still hold potential to learn, to enact, to grow.
A friend recently told me she’d enrolled in piano lessons. She’s in her mid-twenties and has never played. But she wants to learn. That news was some of the most beautiful (and hopeful) I’d heard all week.
When I visited my parents this past winter, my mom showed me the paintings and drawings she’d created in the past few months. Watercoloring is a new post-retirement hobby of hers. One evening we watched a tutorial together and made landscape paintings. Hers was really good and mine was not so good and we both had a lot of fun. She initiated me into her practice. Paying no mind to my lack of experience, she invited me to the table and taught me.
I suppose this is standard enough when it comes to art making, but it’s unfortunately less common in cultural, political, religious spaces. This comes at a cost. When we shame ignorance, we kill curiosity. And in times like these, we desperately need curiosity. We need questions. We need the liberty to say, “I don’t know what that means,” and assurance that such admissions will be met with gentle teaching.
I’m guilty on many counts: I’ve shamed ignorance and I’ve snuffed my own curiosity. But I’d like to revive both. I’m practicing. This month I started doing yoga, because I’m not flexible and I’ve never given it a fair go. My suspicion is that there’s power in doing things we’re bad at. I think practicing things that don’t come naturally is kindred to admitting our shortcomings. At the very least, it serves as a small commitment to pursuing new knowledge and breaking through my unknowing. Somewhere in here there is a bad pun about stretching.
In hopes that you’ll forgive my poor humor and join me in this extension of curiosity,
Shanley
