When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz piano. And then I went traveling, because I felt that I might have missed something and it would be a good idea to learn it before I got my master's degree. {...} And the older I grew, and the farther I traveled, the younger I grew and the less I knew. I could feel it happening to me. I could actually walk down a dirty street and feel all my wisdom slipping away from me, all the things I wrote term papers about.
In this reflection, the speaker shares their experience of youthful confidence accompanied by a sense of knowing everything except their true desires. They highlight their knowledge of various subjects, from the arts to politics, and how they felt compelled to travel in search of deeper understanding before formal education could solidify their knowledge.
As time passed and they journeyed further, a paradox unfolded: with each new experience, they felt younger and increasingly aware of their ignorance. The mundane realities of life made them acutely conscious of the limitations of their prior wisdom, revealing a profound transformation in their perspective as they embraced the vastness of what they still had to learn.
