Clueless – Blissfully Unaware

A lot of the reflecting that I do is brain-related. Or well, I obviously don’t mean the gushy slimy grey matter lump sitting there in your skull, but the brainy things connected to intelligence, or consciousness or awareness and patterns/behaviors that it controls. It’s fun to think about thinking. Or at least, that’s how I feel about it.

But sometimes I do wonder what it would be like to be more clueless than I am right now. I’m saying clueless on purpose, because I definitely wouldn’t wanna be any less ‘smart’ as it were, but I would love to be a lot more not-in-the-know. Do you catch my drift?

There’s a poignant difference for me between clueless and stupid. Being clueless doesn’t make you dumb. It’s not that you’re stupid or that you’re lacking intelligence in any way – but it’s just unconsciously missing (crucial) knowledge. It’s not-knowing without knowing that you don’t know. And to me that feels like a state of magic.

To be blissfully unaware would remove so much constraints and concerns that I experience that I can only imagine how ‘light‘ my life would become.
To live a life without seeing the voids and holes and pitfalls where you just HAVE to find the missing puzzle pieces. To feel whole, even if you aren’t. Ultimate happiness.

It’s like with music and lyrics, right?
Can you remember those moments as a kid where you were just cheerfully blaring along to some song or other, without any concept of the meaning of the texts you were singing (or without even worrying in you were getting the words right?) And do you then also recall the moments where reality hit you in the face like a ton of bricks when the meaning DOES become apparent? And did you ever feel the same about such a song afterwards? Nope. You didn’t. I guarantee it.

I myself have LOADS of examples in that specific area. Most of them quite gruesome.

I mean, I used to LOVE this song ‘Where the wild roses grow’ as a kid. Until at some point you learn that this romantic and eery tune is actually an hommage to a gruesome murder.

Something similar happened to me with Falco and Jeanny. Belting out the tortured ‘JEANNY, QUIT LIVING ON DREAMS’ with that throaty voice as hard as I could – only to discover later that it’s a song sung by the stalker-murderer of a poor girl. Freaky shit.

My mom had the same thing (but a lot less creepy) with ‘La Camisa Negra’ by Juanes. This (according to her) lovely cheery song just HAD to be made into her ringtone because it made her happy every time she heard it. Little did she know the song itself is actually quite a heartbroken dark little ditty. Whoops!
(I still obliged back then in the nokia era and tortured myself downloading the correct tune via limewire and putting it on her phone and setting it as a ringtone)

And DON’T even get me started on ‘If you seek Amy’ by Britney Spears. Remember the riot that song caused back in the days when parents suddenly heard their kids spelling out FUCK in tune with miss Spears? (Can you even imagine our innocence and outrage about something to petty less than a decade ago, with WAP now hitting the charts?). Oh, how we’ve ‘evolved‘ ;).

Anyway. The point remains unchanged regardless of the boatload of examples.

We can love something regardless of (fully) understanding it.

Yet somehow I keep choosing not to do that. Somehow I’ve always had this urge to overanalyze anything in my path instead of opting to remain in the clueless state of blissful unawareness.
By digging in, getting to the bottom of everything and wielding damn Google as a weapon – I do increase my (oftentimes totally irrelevant) knowledge on a myriad of topics, only to subsequently lose my enamored state once I realize the true meaning.

Do I really need to know the origin story of every series that I watch? Do I need to find out the background to the historic novels that I read to better appreciate the drama and love triangles? Do I honestly need to know who discovered my favorite type of candy to better enjoy it? Or does finding out the amount of calories or the effect of the carbohydrates on my weight really improve me enjoying my food? Nope. Nope it doesn’t.

And in that line of thinking: do I really need to know someone’s entire past, present and future before being able to open up to them in any meaningful way? I want so badly to answer ‘no’ to that question, and spend my life living blissfully unaware – but brain keeps saying ‘yes’ and hunting for all of the info. I can’t live not knowing, yet at the same time I’d die to not-know that I don’t know.