In Praise Of Not Knowing
The joy of choosing curiosity over certainty
Do you remember how our childhood joy was born from all we did not know? The answers we did not yet have? How exploration was the source of our excitement? As a kid, curiosity was my life’s blood. I glowed with it. Are there colors on other planets that don’t exist on earth? If I touch a cloud will it be sticky like cotton candy? Does the tadpole know it’s going to become a frog? The questions themselves were magic. I lived in what I now call The Land of I Don’t Know. It is the sacred land of children, yes. But it is a land we’d all be best served to never outgrow.
As soon as I entered my teens I began to pride myself on knowing. I thought that to be lovable I had to be right. I believed that having the answer meant having it all. But know-it-alls don’t make great learners. To be in a state of not knowing is to be open and receptive, and to be otherwise is very often to be shut down. As I got older, my particular brand of rightness often landed me in judgment, criticism, and blame—which are quite miserable places to be in (regardless of how addictive our culture has made them.) I was never really happy being right. I was rigid, stressed, critical and vulnerable to the shame I felt whenever I was wrong. And most impactful was the fact that my rightness wiped out the curiosity, wonder, and awe that was the pillar of my joy as a child. But as most of us do, I lived with an attachment to being right for years.
When I woke up from the surgery that diagnosed me with cancer, I felt instantly returned to The Land of I Don’t Know. My rightness, my knowing, fell off of me like a heavy burdensome coat. I’ve written about this before, but on Titan (Saturn’s largest moon), raindrops are much bigger than they are on earth, and fall so slowly someone could look up, spot one coming, and move out of the way. Imagine seeing that for the first time––rain inching down from the sky? How wide your eyes would be following each dreaming drop to the ground? You’d be absolutely hypnotized.
The hospital room may as well have been Titan. Specks of dust moved like planets through the sunlight. My whole life, people had called me an old soul. But nothing about me felt old anymore. I felt made of wonder. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen the world,” I wrote after leaving the hospital. “I’ve only been seeing what my mind thought it knew of the world.”
Recently, my friend Margaret sent me an article about people who long ago believed their bodies were made of glass. Whenever I learn about something like people thinking they were made of glass, I feel certain that I am equally delusional about something in my own life, something I’ve gotten wildly wrong, and it excites me to think I could be wildly wrong about something that enormous. What am I getting wrong? What am I not seeing clearly? Does the tadpole know it’s going to become a frog? Am I a tadpole still? What will it feel like to be a frog?
“Once we admit we are not sure where life is taking us, then we are ripe for transformation,” wrote Mark Nepo. I now understand that to not know where I am going is my only true compass.
I think the best teachers are those who ask questions in which the only correct answer is, “I don’t know.” In some ways that’s what koans are. Zen riddles that help people see the deficiencies of the mind’s reasoning. "What was your original face before your mother and father were born?" “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The mind is stopped by these questions, and where the mind stops, the truth is found.
There is a big difference between a truth and an answer. When I land on a truth, I feel my being stretching like sunlight far beyond my physical body, and I experience the thoughts in my mind as passing clouds. And, when I find answers, they very often turn out to be just clouds.
Will you tell me, sweet friends, about the impact of wonder on your life? Will you share a story about a time you chose curiosity over certainty? Or, for you, what is the difference between a truth and an answer? I cherish reading your words.
Thank you so so much for being here.
Love, Andrea 🖤
Two years ago I woke up numb from the waist down. It took 6 weeks to get a diagnosis, which was a long time of not knowing. I decided since I couldn’t have the “real” answer right away, I would spend my not-knowing time imagining the most magical explanation I could think of. I decided that this must be how it feels to transform into a mermaid! So any time I felt anxious or compelled to Google worst case scenarios, instead I imagined myself perched on a rock in the ocean with a glimmering mermaid tail, which made me smile every time. It ended up being MS, which was the worst case scenario I could have imagined. But I still feel so grateful for those 6 weeks I spent immersing myself in a more magical unknown. And you know? It turns out the diagnosis wasn’t as scary as I feared it would be and has come with unique, unexpected gifts.
As a mama I had this deep, abiding, full faith knowing that if death should ever come for my beloved & only child, that my heart would simply stop beating— I had absolute trust in this, each time I feared the worst happening to him (which I think mamas do, believing if we worry enough, the bad things won’t happen, our worry will outsmart danger!), I was assuaged— I didn’t have to consider what I would do or how I would survive—because I just knew that I would cease to exist. It would be handled by the same force that created the love I had for him.
And then— it happened— that worst thing possible. He died. At 18, unexpectedly, closing in on 10 yrs ago now.
And I didn’t.
This has left me without any certainty at all of anything, at all. I am fascinated by the mystery at work within our lives, thoughts, assurances— even our survival. I have utterly surrendered to the not knowing/not being able to predict or prepare, understand or control. The world feels utterly upside down from what “I knew” since the day the most beloved boy I know left this realm— and I am left with my mouth agape in wild wonder of everything because I was so wrong about that thing.