How Do You Know That?

Most people have walked past a lot of gold mines because they were, essentially, lazy. 

“That’s just a pile if dirt,” they sniffed. 

And that was exactly what it was until someone who had the fire called desire produced a deep dish and began carefully washing the dirt.

It was slow work, and it took months, but in the end, there was a small vial of gold dust, and that gold was forever. It was gold that could neither be created nor destroyed. But could it be found? Oh yes. But not by everyone. Only by those with the fire called desire. 

And the lesson is this: If you truly want Gold, there is nothing I can say or do that will stop you. And if you don’t truly want Gold, there is nothing I can say or do that will help you, because all you well ever see is the dirt. You will never look at a pile of dirt as opportunity to find gold.

This is why I hate the question so often directed at me:  How do you know that?  

People ask as if knowing stuff is some sort of magic trick.  As if there’s some secret stash or magic URL.

The question is to trivialize the mining of the gold — to minimize the effort to know stuff and to be right more often than not.

Insatiable curiosity is both a blessing and a disease.  What it is most assuredly **not** is a magic trick.

When mining for information, you never stop at the flash.  You keep washing and reducing, separating the stones from the black sand and then the black sand from what appears to be gold.

But is it really gold?  

You test it, weigh it, fire it, treat it with mercury, and then — after thousands of hours — you reconstitute it as a small ingot, perhaps no larger than a little finger.

How did you get that you are asked, as if it must be an accidental or easy thing.  Where can I casually find gold like that?  Surely it’s some sort of alchemy, the kissing cousin of magic?

You point to the dirt and the pan.

It’s never the answer they are looking for, and it’s rarely one they even understand.

Surely there must be some trick? You can’t possibly have panned 40 tons of dirt to get what you got. Tell me the trick.

But there is no trick beyond sitting at river’s edge and shoveling tons of dirt into a sluce, followed by swirling the pan over whatever settles in the traps.

There is no magic.  It’s all suspiciously like work. 

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Related Post:  Magical Thinking.