Lost Knowledge
Stonehenge. Pyramids. Moai statues. Nazca Lines. Monuments of ancient wisdom, standing against the sky, their secrets lost. We look back and wonder. How were these built? The answers have slipped, like sand, through the fingers of time.
Our story, the human story, is one of adaptability. We learn, we forget. We hold onto what is needed, and let go of what is not. Our brains are not warehouses of infinite space. They are selective, focused on the now, the necessary.
Consider the Stonehenge, the Pyramids. Giant stones moved without cranes or trucks. A skill lost to us. The ancients watched the stars, charted courses, and seasons. They knew the skies as we know the streets of our cities. No telescopes. No satellites. Yet, they understood.
Now, look closer to our time. Handwriting, once an art, is fading. Caligraphy, a skill of beauty and precision, might soon be a relic. We have forgotten the medicinal secrets of plants, turning instead to chemistry in labs. Messages once flew on the wings of pigeons. Now, such ideas belong in stories, not in our reality.
But this is our nature. To forget. To learn anew. To adapt. The European table, filled with potatoes and tomatoes, was barren of these just five centuries ago. Now, they are staples. Unimaginable to think of a meal without them. We adapt. We change. Quickly.
From this, we take simple lessons. To move forward, we learn. To learn, we must unlearn. Our minds are not infinite. We make space for the new by letting go of the old.
As individuals, this is our journey. Every decade demands a shedding of skin. Old knowledge out, new knowledge in. This is not a loss. It is growth. It is evolution.
Some knowledge fades naturally. The phone numbers we once memorized are gone, replaced by the memory of a device. We adapt without thought.
Other times, we must push. Moving countries means recalibrating unlearning thinking in old customs or currencies and embracing new ones. Driving on a different side of the road demands a temporary forgetting.
So, here’s what this has taught me:
To roll forward, we gotta pick up new notes, new tunes.
And to make room for the new, we gotta let some of the old records stop spinning.
Now, AI reshapes our learning. It asks us to unlearn old methods of document creation, design, idea generation. It asks us to learn anew.
Make space. Unlearn. Learn. This is our cycle. In it, we find our growth, our adaptability, our humanity. We stand, not so different from those who built the pyramids or charted the stars. We look forward, armed with the knowledge of the past, and a readiness for the future.
