Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart,
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms
or books written in a very foreign language.
Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually,
without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
From an early age I have been interested in what knowledge is. How it is that a piece of information mediated by the press of a button or a light source can become a piece of data.
I remember asking my Dad when I must have been about age 8 what happened when I pressed the button on the pelican crossing. The answer was that it “registered” that I was there. What did that mean? The button could start a chain of events but what did it mean that my press was “registered”?
When calculators were invented the same question emerged only larger. Here was a set of keys into which information could be entered and would provoke information to be displayed.