The Quest for Self-Knowledge or More Thoughts on Hardie-Plank

I like to know stuff. Bring up something arcane (Hardie-Plank, anyone?), and the next time you see me, I’ll have googled the life out of it. If I know something lies around the next corner (Hardie-Plank, anyone?), I want to know something about that something.

I’ve always put this tendency down to healthy curiosity, a keen interest in life, a ravenous desire to acquire knowledge just for knowledge’s sake. And isn't that just oh-so-cool (or hot or sick or wicked or sweet—I recently looked up teen jargon)? But this quirk of mine has a dark side.

I’ve read fourteen-gazillion-million self-help books, give or take a few. Whenever a problem, a challenge, a new stage, or a seminal event (I’m talking Really Seminal here: marriage, birth, death, divorce, and unexplained weight gain) crops up in my life, I turn to research. Right now, my bedside table holds:

THE LANGUAGE OF LETTING GO (Hazelden)
THE GRIEF CLUB, Melodie Beattie
EAT, PRAY, LOVE, Elizabeth Gilbert
THE SEVEN SPIRITUAL LAWS OF SUCCESS, Deepak Chopra
WOMEN’S BODIES, WOMEN’S WISDOM, Christiane Northrup
TRAVELING MERCIES, SOME THOUGHTS ON FAITH Anne LaMott
OPENING OUR HEARTS, TRANSFORMING OUR LOSSES Al-Anon Family Groups
EACH DAY A NEW BEGINNING (Hazelden)
CODEPENDENT NO MORE, Melodie Beattie
THE POWER OF NOW, Eckhart Tolle
LEAP! Sara Davidson
And, the BIBLE, among others.

It’s a big bedside table.

They’re all there because I either haven’t finished them...

(For whatever reason, I reserve what I call my “spiritual reading” for bedtime reading only. Bedtime reading may consist of only thirty-four-point-oh-eight seconds before I’m snoring. Also, I rarely read an entire book before starting another; which means I’m reading all of these at once.)

Anyway, as I said, they’re either there because I haven’t finished them, or because I have, and I've appreciated their wisdom, and I like having them where I can readily poke through them again.

A perusing of the titles at my bedside gives you a snapshot of the challenges my life holds at any particular moment. Admirable of me, don’t you think, to want to face my problems head on? Well, it is, kind of. I try not to keep my head in the sand. I aim for self-awareness, even though I often fall woefully short.

But the sheer number of titles indicates the dark side of my self-knowledge quest. It indicates my tendency to think that if I just know enough, I’ll be in control... if I just read enough, I’ll know all the outcomes. Laughable, of course. Nobody can ever know what lies around the next corner.

And is that really so bad? As my exasperated sister said the last time I verged on an anxiety attack (right after she said, “Will you just stop it already?!”), knowing everything might just take all the fun out of life.

So, I suppose I could lighten up on my reading. But, sometime, ask me about Hardie-Plank.