Knowledge is a Garden

“Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.” (Ghana)

I’ve been slacking at both. I have not tended my garden lately, and I haven’t read much these days. This is important. Without feeding yourself with books, without weeding and seeding your garden, you have nothing to provide the world. New information can grow and feed you—give you new ways of seeing the world. Getting your hands in the dirt gives you fruits and vegetables that will sustain you. Read. Grow. Read again. Grow food and your imagination and your humanity.

I believe it’s time to pick up Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone. It has sat on the coffee table judging me for too long. Read y’all.

GO READ A BOOK. I have been in academia longer than I have in any other profession. We spend our breaks planning, thinking, and hopefully creating new ways (not always better, I might add) to teach our students the same materials semester after semester. But then something starts to happen. We have ditched our academic pursuits in the search for teaching the “best” course. Of course this is a course some of us have not taken in decades. We start to rust. I watch professors who have taught longer than I have been alive, completely ignorant (and obsolete) to their own specialities. New theories and new scholars are invisible to them. They haven’t read for themselves in years, decades, and it shows.

I say this because this proverb has greater context than just “educate yourself.” It’s also a call to us—the so-called masters and experts in our fields—to keep sharpening and honing our talent. If we do not, we become barren. What do we provide to anyone if we have not improved ourselves?

So the proverb basically means, “go read a book,” (as I love to say), but with an addition, “so you will have something useful to provide from it.”