The Root Of Knowing

We are born to know.

The proof is in the baby.

A human baby is a seed, arriving in the world with everything it needs to become what it is capable of becoming.

Unlike any other life on Earth, human beings do not only create more life—they create new realities.

Through ideas, dreams, desire, and an unexplainable, compulsive need to make a life.

From the very beginning, the world supports this lifespan from fertility, to fecundity, to mortality. Mother nature speaks to the baby through touch, sound, sight, taste, and smell—then color, beauty, harmony, patterns, symbols, actions, and reactions—before they can even talk.

This is our biological baggage.

Every human starts life dependent on grown babies who survived because their own biological, physiological, emotional, and spiritual non-negotiable needs were met until they could meet them on their own. These are the same needs we will all have to meet to grow, thrive, and self-actualize until we die.

No one can stand the suffering of a miserable baby for a reason. We are wired to relieve it. When those needs are not met, a baby closes its eyes and screams so loudly it can’t hear. It can’t talk and tell you what's wrong because it doesn’t know anything yet.

Even if it is not ours, we will find a way to ease its discomfort by meeting its needs.

The minute those needs are met, and that baby feels safe and protected, it opens its eyes again. It can hear. It begins to use its mouth for sound. It begins to learn a language. It begins to see things and begins to thrive.

Then the brain kicks in and goes, I want to know all there is to know.

It wants to know what that sound is. What that color is. What that face is. What that feeling is. The desire to know is one of the first signs that a human being is thriving. This continues into adulthood, until our time is up.

The hands that rock the cradle rule the world. We are those hands. Hands that care.

The root of knowing begins here.

Eight billion babies, and counting, have survived so far because we are wired to care and meet each other’s needs. Children are promised, through the words and deeds of adult humans, that the world they come into is one where everyone shares what they know, cares about what they need, and wants them to thrive and actualize their dreams. We build systems around it.

But we never teach a child that once they graduate from childhood, they will move to a different hood—adulthood—where they will create life on their own. Not everyone will want to meet their needs. Not everyone who knows better will want them to know better, or care.

This omission causes great suffering. People spend much of life trying to know so they can feel certain, when it is the other way around.

Babies do not seek certainty. They are driven to know how to belong, become, and birth a life, from root to fruit. That is how they learn they can make things. A color becomes a picture. Toy blocks become a building. A sound becomes a word. A word becomes a sentence. A sentence becomes a thought. A thought becomes something they can share.

The more babies know, the more they trust the world.

The more they know they belong to this world, the more they know they are meant to become the world, and like Mother Nature, birth beautiful realities where all living things thrive.

Knowing is what happens when human curiosity becomes creation itself.

We are here to expand from a little tiny baby into our fullest self through knowing. With relationships. With passions. With pursuits. Most of all, with dreams. Humans are the only ones who can watch a bird, then make a spaceship that can fly a crew to the dark side of the moon and back. To know more.

The destiny of every human being is to achieve the potential they have to be happy, like a baby, from root to fruit, by knowing more. That is the nutshell of the fecundity of our life: the ability to create abundance beyond our means with what we know, to raise others up in their knowing. Something no other living creature on Earth can do.

The happiness of our world depends on it.

We are destined to embody our motherly nature, a home that recycles all life on earth, and leave this world better than we found it. Because we are firmly rooted in fertile soil. The humus we come from. The root of what makes us human.

There are things I will never know in my lifetime. I don’t know what happens after death, but I do know that energy doesn’t break apart. It doesn’t die. Nothing leaves this atmosphere. All the atoms and dust particles of other people are eating with us, breathing with us, and bouncing around with us every day. Not to mention the DNA and genetics of our ancestors that remain inside our bodies.

So who knows if my atoms and my DNA recognize the atoms and DNA of a stranger I have never met, and I think, God, we’ve met each other before. Scientifically speaking, based on what remains yet to be known, it is possible.

Knowing changes what is possible. For example, once everyone had to accept the Earth was round, all remaining contradictions and false judgments had to be reconciled, discarded, or ignored. This included maritime stories about monsters and fearful waterfalls no one had ever seen at the bottom of a flat edge to which no one had actually ever been.

I like to think I live in a world where imagination makes Einstein use physics laws to imagine and create a GPS system he never lived to see, and my neighbor can imagine a heaven with streets of gold as a possible eternal retirement plan.

I am more of a Golden Rule girl.

I love to imagine a future based on the study of art, science, and the language of knowledge. Based on what I know so far, I believe for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Loving one another as ourselves is care in action. Telling ourselves we don’t care goes against our biological wiring.

We are born to know. And when we don’t, we spend a lifetime looking for answers. This causes great suffering.

When we do choose knowing, we spend a lifetime creating with them.

I don’t know, but wanting to know, is our North Star.

 Send this to someone you know. 

Gretchen. Author Note

I came to this work not through therapy or a doctorate, but through a bucket of paint. I didn’t hear a calling, and I wasn’t particularly gifted at art. Color became my vehicle for self-actualization not because I loved decorating, but because using paint colors to make myself feel at home changed how I felt about the world.

This is my way of sharing what I know.