Wouldn't it be refreshing if we couldn't instantly find answers to our most obscure questions online? Every time I wonder about something these days I either ask someone in close vicinity or go to Google, and oftentimes... I don't get the answer anyway. Or I do.

Either way I'm either satisfied with the answer I get (IOW with getting the answer) or disappointed that I didn't get one, but I move on, and that's that. The stream of questions is eternal and spontaneous. Both unimportant and life-altering wonders pass by just like that.

But Imagine if we lived in a world where advice wasn't so easy to come by. A world where a wealth of obscure information wasn't always readily accessible via our fiber and fingertips. Imagine if we actually had to formulate our own theories for the questions we have. To devise our own solutions for the problems we get. To come to our own conclusions regarding the truths of myths and mannerisms - often ending up with different truths than those of the people around us.

Imagine looking into space and... wondering if the world might be round. Imagine trying new herbs to cure a disease, and discovering one root that works wonders. Imagine formulating your own theories as to why we exist, what our purpose is, and what we're supposed to do with our lives. Instead of turning to existing religion we form our own. Or don't.

Our circumstances and surroundings would inspire us, but we would steer the way. We wouldn't take the high way and blaze through life in a straight line: we'd make our own winding path, with all the ups and downs it entails, and all other wonders we might find along the way. We'd decide where to go, and we'd go there, and maybe we'd stumble onto someone else's path along the way - or they'd stumble onto ours.

Maybe a line of people will follow and widen the path. Maybe it'd be forgotten, and veiled in darkness and mystery. Maybe someone would find it again years later - like an abandoned Temple high up on the mountains of Tibet, radiating a wisdom that someone once owned, ready to done. A stranger waiting to hone that wisdom once again.

These days it often feels like we just know too much.

If we don't then someone else does. If we don't have the information then it's easy to fetch, and so the creative, enlightening and stimulating process of finding our own answers is lost. There's no longer a temple in the mountains just waiting to be found, because they blew up that mountain and built a skyscraper there instead, and then a road to the tower, and then branches of roads to the main one from all possible locations. The winner write history, or in this case they write the truth, and in a global world the truth becomes global.

Your perceptions on reality might change slightly depending on which road you take, but in the end the temple is the same. We may split up into minority groups, all with spin-off beliefs of our own, yet they all adhere to the common whole. There are norms now. People don't run around in the forests with bow and arrow and eat strange mushrooms to journey into another world. We're not allowed to do that anymore.

A select few ingenious tribes still live that way, but they're outnumbered, and undermined by the stigma of social order. The system. The modern world. It's just a matter of time before their roads branch onto the other roads, and those roads lead them to our temple too.

I'm not saying we should live like they do, or be oblivious to the 'progress' humankind has made over the years, but I wish we had the freedom to choose. I wish we weren't forced onto a road from which we can't turn. I wish we could make our own without running over someone elses.

Sometimes I wish the Internet didn't exist, that the map was still full of white blotches and we still lived with all our false misconceptions and myths of old... well, with some of them. The good ones. Or that we at least were open to new ones...

Of course that's not human nature though. Even in the modern, most open-minded era of man (so they claim) we are close-minded as ever. Maybe the closed quarters are what close our minds. We don't want to see beyond our reality because there is no other reality we can make for ourselves.

I wish we lived in a time where the world wasn't a finite realm, but open to our imagination and incentive. A world where there was room for our inventiveness to truly grow and flourish. To create... without restrictions.

These days everything is already there. It's already done. It's dull and draconian. I wish the grass was still untrampled on the ground I tread... wet with morning dew that glistens in the light. Not paved and dusty with grease and chewing gum.

We know too much, yet few of us know what that is really like.

Maybe that is really life.