I have been remiss in that I have ceased making careful notes of my experience. I think this is a mistake. I want to return to the forest and take a look at another branch of knowledge. Several branches actually.

I recently saw Dr D and inquired after a technical term that begins with an S and refers to a mode of psychological coping activity. Dr D had no idea what I was talking about.

In searching for the correct term, I ended up leafing through Wikipedia. It was in the course of this search for the elusive “S” word that I stumbled upon a page which detailed a whole host of psychological defense mechanisms. The word that I think I was searching for was found there: Sublimation. But it was another defense mechanism that caught my eye.

Intellectualization is a means to remove one’s self from a stressful emotional event. In my youth I was beaten by my peers because I was different: I had funny arms due to a birth injury. My response to the beatings, and peer group rejection, was to take refuge in intellectual understanding, to embark on an attempt to understand why one group of human beings would wilfully mistreat another, much weaker, human.

The use of this defense mechanism launched me on a study of everything. I acquired a thirst for understanding, a vast desire for knowledge, a youthful voyage of discovery that led me toward the university study of epistemology, that branch of philosophic investigation concerned with the study of knowledge itself, the manner in which it is structured, the means we employ to determine if something is true, untrue, or knowable.

Of course, once I emerged into the real world and attempted to find work, I found no one else understood the subject I found so enthralling. When I informed a potential employer that I had studied epistemology at university, and was really very good at it, this admission was invariably met with a frown, and a wry grimace, quickly followed by the polite explanation that they truly had very little need for medical specialists and I would meet with much better success if I applied for a position with a major hospital. My interlocutor would then lean in close and quietly confess that his wife had required an epistemology during the recent birth of their daughter. He would then add that almost all of the hospitals were in desperate need of well trained epistemologists such as I appeared to be.

I immediately followed this well intentioned advice and ended up working in marine search and rescue, bouncing around the coastal waters of British Columbia with the Canadian Coast Guard in boats that were always much smaller than the surrounding waves. And it was during this superficial employment that I arrived at the realization that life was nothing more than an unending stream of epistemological problems, one following immediately after the other. As fellow crewman Bill Dalzell so eloquently described it: “everyone wants the learnin’ but no one knows the gettin’ of it.”

Fortunately, I never learned the getting of it. It was not until 40 years later, when I was bouncing around on the rocky hillocks of the Gatineau, that I suddenly understood the chief cognitive process that had served to shape my life, and mould me as a human being.