Children come hardwired seeking answers from the moment they can verbalize their needs.
Parents are well acquainted with the endless why questions as their kids collect knowledge and gain a better understanding of the world.
In adulthood our search for answers moves from our desire to understand to our desire to control the narrative.
Uncertainty creates anxiety, fear, and worry.
Control and uncertainty are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
In her article How to Relax When You Don’t Have the Answers, Rev. Nancy Colier suggests that surprisingly, not knowing can bring its own peace.
“Reason and scientific proof have been anointed as our kings.
“Thinking, we believe, will solve whatever questions and challenges life presents.
“At this moment in history, we’ve lost interest and, to some degree, respect, for all the other ways of knowing: bodily, intuitively, experientially, and so forth - all the ways we can know other than through thinking and logic.”
This mindset runs afoul from the early lectures of Socrates who taught, “The only true wisdom is in knowing we know nothing.”
How on earth did we end up on opposite ends of the spectrum of knowing and Socrates’ stance we know nothing?
Rev. Colier believes our unwillingness to accept the unknown sits at the root of our excessive thinking, and our anxiety.
She notes, “We’re taught from the time we’re born that knowing is good - we are good, worthy, if we have the answers. ‘You should know better’ is what we hear when we’re young and have done something wrong.
“We feel shame and inadequacy when we don’t have the answers. Not knowing is a form of failure.”
Our world is constantly changing just as our knowledge and understanding must grow rather than stagnate.
Rev. Colier suggests, “We do a lot of faking it, ‘impostering’ when it comes to knowing. Simultaneously, we rush to answers that aren’t true or sustainable.
“Given the frequency with which the experience of not knowing or at least not yet knowing shows up in life, we would be wise to learn how to inhabit it and, even better, to do so with a sense of acceptance and relaxation rather than judgment and fear.”
Are we able to give ourselves permission to rest in a place of faith and acceptance of the unknown?
That’s a tall order when seeking peace, but truthfully, it’s our best chance of fulfilling our purpose by surrendering our need for control.
In other words, be willing to embrace the only place there is between the past and the future - the now.
