The beauty of ignorance

The beauty of ignorance

As a child, the world knew I would squander my money on books — blame my father.

I had books for reading and books on cursive writing (even though my writing still looks like chicken scratch when I am under pressure). My father had a love affair with books — I was his associate.

Every week, I had a list of books to read, and then I would write out the words I had never seen before, write out their dictionary meanings and defend them to my father. Grammar was our love language.

My English (written and spoken) is a shadow of what it could have been because I became grossly embarrassed by my command of English at age twelve or thirteen. So, I started learning street slang to feel normal.

Habitually, I would use a word I had not heard in years to realize I used it correctly. Every time it happens, I get happy because it feels like a postcard from my childhood.

I still remember my father’s library — my version of a public library where every book borrowed must be returned with no crease, tear or stain. This library attendant would still lend you another book at the cost of an earful of why books are to be loved ever so gently or not at all.

Imagine my wonder every time I found anyone with a vaster library than my father’s — Honey Pie they have A, B & C books that we do not have. I have never stopped being enamoured by books I neither owned nor read.

I would have Ghanaian story swaps with my friends at school to finish each book before the next break. This meant I read stories in the middle of my classes. By SS1, I thought school was a waste of time if my class notes were already inside my textbook. All these excuses were so I could go to the library for the literature section.

Then I discovered this thing called an encyclopedia — it was everything the dictionary wished it was. I liked it because it was voluminous and not because I tried reading it two days in a row and felt more intelligent than everyone else.

When I got to the university, non-academic books gave me the sugar rush. I bought books on medicine, dieting, travelling and others. Again, blame my father for feeding me Time magazines before I discovered romance novels even existed.

However, I needed to make a career decision at 18 because I realized I enjoyed working at a startup magazine company than I did the thoughts of being a gynaecologist. This was where my problems started.

I started to review everything I ever liked, every skill, every talent, every compliment that stood out, every insult, and it was a lot of data.

At this time, I was exploring research writing and had written my first article on oral sex, but it meant nothing. Right? No one makes a career from stuff like that.

Since nothing worked, I picked up poetry and tried to sound like Shakespeare while studying boring physics. Unfortunately, we did not get to fun topics like nuclear and particle physics till final year —enough time for psychology to steal my heart.

That was when I learned I was not supposed to major in everything that fascinated me. I was allowed to throw my head back in the rain singing and not think meteorology should be a career choice.

I learned that your IQ stays undiminished if you are ignorant in some areas. Someone once said, “The beauties of the library are the unread books”. Does it mean I choose to be unaware? Na! It means my destination is not any library I can exhaust.

My awe for other people’s wisdom is predicated on my willingness to be the fool where they are kings. I enjoy the moments when I say “Expatiate that” because it indicates that I am standing in a new library — a world of books I have never seen before.

When I go to the market, I like to chitchat with the sellers because I opine that the story of a people lives in their marketplace. So, I go to the market knowing it is a library of oral books — tales never published for the world to read.

In my world, ignorance is a gift. In truth, that was how I killed impostor syndrome — what I do not know is a testament to what I know.

When the pressure to brag about what I read began to fade, my childhood reemerged — the desire to read quickly because it gave me more tools to work with.

I will never forget that ignorance set me free in its way.