Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Personal Life Update: Of the Making of Many Books There is No End

My reading of that verse in Ecclesiastes 12:12 is that the process of recording, preserving, and transmitting information is an endless task. It appears to be connected to learning, since the following verse says "much study wearies the body." For me, I read lots of articles online, which by virtue of their content is like a topical chapter-of-the-day consumption of the literature that is often referenced, but I also take what I learn and try to process it so that it's understandable to the point where I can explain it to others. If something doesn't make sense in a big-picture sense, to me, I try to comprehend it until it does. I have an upcoming "Adultification" post about just one such thing.

How does 'making books' apply to me? Well, I'm not writing bound textbooks, but a lot of what I've written on this blog is repurposed high-level technical, philosophical or theological works, with a sizeable amount of my own contribution--expanding upon the wisdom gained, and drawing further conclusions. You could consider it "derived knowledge," in the same way that many mathematical equations are derived from other equations. An increase in knowledge without any additional input, as it's all the result of internal mental processing of the information that is already possessed.

That's why there is no end to the making of many books. Not only because new information is continually gained, but for each individual, you can indefinitely expand upon the knowledge you have, in order to gain new knowledge from the processing of that information.

It's a bit like how experimental studies yield data, multiple data sets give you the ability to arrange them in statistical relations, and the interpretation of these statistics give you insight into what is going on on the experimental level, and opens new doors for asking the right questions to gain greater knowledge about the subject.

Enough rambling. Suffice it to say, there's so much stuff for me to work on, be it personal professional development or private economics, or fulfilling my backlog of ideas for posting subjects on this blog. It's a challenge to not disproportionately spend time blogging rather than "living life," while at the same time making progress on the goals I have in mind for "completing" the blog's purpose.

I'm going to try to take a few days over the coming holiday season to work through some of this backlog and produce good-quality content and make progress. What is it that Ecclesiastes says, after all? "There is nothing better for a man than that he should enjoy the fruit of his labor." Ecclesiastes 2:24

~ Rak Chazak

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