smarty-pants

yesterday i finished "the know-it-all," which i thoroughly enjoyed, partly because it made me laugh out loud a bunch of times, and partly because it was filled with fun facts to impress your friends (did you know that bananas and pumpkins are actually berries and the fruit that we think of as berries are not? now you'll have to read the book to find out why). but despite all the fun facts with which i will most certainly torture my friends and family (dogs have three eyelids), there is one lesson that stuck out to me in gold flashing letters. here's the story:

the author's friend told him a fable that one time a king wanted to know everything in the world. the wisest men in the kingdom gathered all the facts they could find and presented the king with three volumes of every fact known to man. the king said it was too long; make it shorter.

so the men went away and came back with a nice slim volume that they had pared down, about the size of a novel. still too long.

they came back one last time carrying a page with a single sentence. "this too shall pass."

to me, that sentence is both reassuring and terrifying. it's reassuring that the bad things will one day not be so bad. everything i'm stressed or sad or scared about now won't be nearly as pressing, and that's nice to know. but the sentence is also frightening.

look at it this way: i spent the weekend in madison with my parents, one of my sisters and my oldest niece. my niece is ten years old, but i remember very clearly the day she was born. yesterday we drove past the first apartment they lived in and i flashed back to crawling behind my toddler niece up the stairs as she learned to crawl.

i'm not old by any means, only 24, but suddenly i realized how quickly time passes. there is so much to take in and so much to learn. look at how much there is out there to learn: i don't know even a one-hundredth of what i would like to know. i'm not saying i'm going to read the encyclopedia or anything, but i'm going to keep that motto in mind.

"this too shall pass."

or in other words, stay curious. keep learning and growing and never stop.

currently listening to: feist, the reminder

(okay, i'm totally stealing this idea from myspace, but i think it's great.)