Not Knowing

I know I'm hardly alone in repeatedly making such resolutions. Many of us do things like set goals, create schedules, and make budgets, then confidently set off into the future like old-time sailors with their trusty maps and compasses. 

Then inevitably, something unforeseen happens that alters our carefully planned course: the wind changes, the sail tears, the map is wrong.

In hindsight, it's painfully clear that unexpected events are the norm, not the exception. 

How many of us anticipated and planned for Covid? The astonishingly rapid rise of AI? The political and economic upheavals of the past several years? 

Unexpected events also regularly occur in our personal lives: the sudden death or serious illness of a friend or family member; major changes in our most important relationships; unanticipated twists in our jobs and careers. 

I've increasingly found myself thinking about how to balance our very real need to predict the future with the fundamentally unpredictable nature of what lies ahead. 

One approach I've found particularly useful is simply accepting the reality of what the anthropologist and Zen teacher Joan Halifax calls "not knowing." 

Not knowing doesn't mean being uninformed or passive. Instead, it's a way of living and acting that emphasizes remaining aware of and open to what is actually happening, rather than clinging too tightly to what we expected, wished, or feared would happen. 

We still make plans and set goals based on our best understanding of the future. But at the same time, we accept that something will inevitably disrupt at least some of those plans and in the process perhaps change our understanding of what we want and where we're going. 

So instead of trying to eliminate uncertainty, we become more comfortable living with and accepting it. We hold our knowledge, beliefs, and plans a little more lightly. And we become more flexible and resilient when the unexpected happens. 

I've found that embracing not knowing, while certainly not easy, can be surprisingly liberating.

It can help us get unstuck by preventing uncertainty from becoming an excuse for paralysis and procrastination. 

Ironically, it can actually help us plan better because it removes some of the pressure by allowing us to see that our plans are provisional and subject to change.

And perhaps most importantly, it can help us live more fully in the present and stop postponing our lives until some mythical period of certainty arrives.