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Mind Games
The Art of Not Knowing
The humbling power of ‘I don’t know’
It snowed yesterday, even though it’s the middle of spring. Flurries are working themselves into a tizzy today, too. I packed only a single sweater in the two suitcases I lugged across the country with me.
I’ve worn it every day for the past week.
I am unemployed, with absolutely no idea what sort of employment I’d like to pursue. My bank account is a wasteland, and I’m sniffling into my phone outside a cafe where I just purchased a $7 macadamia-milk latte. I am having a meltdown.
“I just want someone to tell me what to do!” I sob, overdramatic as always.
“I’m hearing that,” my mother responds, perpetually patient with my petulance. She then leaves the airspace between us infuriatingly vacant, waiting for me to fill it.
Reluctantly, I collect myself and sigh, “They’re not going to, though.”
“No,” she confirms.
Some days, I really wish they would.
Succulent is the satisfaction of having the answers. To know, and to have known — all along, perhaps — is our baseline of control. If we know something to be true, or if we make it true in our minds, we then hold power over it. Depending on our will, we can shape it, shift it, or even break it.
Knowledge is power, they say.
Knowledge is the hand grasping at the perception of power, I say.
As much as we would like to, I don’t think we alone dictate the endgame of our universe. There is a certain balance of chaos to the world, created, largely, by the presence of other humans. Each of us is moving freely through our own spaces, flapping our butterfly wings and sending tsunamis crashing up against one another’s worlds.
For most of my life, I operated under the assumption that I knew just about everything. At least as it concerned my own life. I knew what I was doing, and where I was going.
I progressed through life’s checklist with systematic proficiency: I graduated high school and went to university. I graduated university and got a job. When I didn’t like that job, I went back to school. I got another job and…
