Nobody Teaches You How to Stand in the I Don't Know

We are very good at solving things.

Give us a problem with edges and we will work it until it yields. We have been doing this our entire lives. The calendar, the crisis, the person who needs something, the situation that needs managing. We assess, we move, we resolve. We are excellent at this. It is one of the things we are most proud of about ourselves, even when we would not say it out loud.

And then we arrive somewhere that does not have edges. Somewhere that cannot be worked or managed or resolved into a neat outcome. The old way has stopped working and the new way has not arrived yet and there is just this: the not knowing. The standing still in the middle of something that has no clear next step.

Nobody teaches you how to do that. Nobody sits you down and says: here is how you stand in the I don't know without it eating you alive. Here is how you stay in the question without treating it as a problem. Here is how you let the not knowing just be what it is for a while.

We were taught to move. To fix. To figure it out. Standing still in uncertainty was not on the curriculum.

But here is what is true: the I don't know is not a failure of knowing. It is a place. A real place with its own weather and its own particular silence. And some of the most important things that ever happened to us happened while we were standing in it, waiting for something we did not yet have words for.

The question is not how to get out of the I don't know faster. The question is how to stand in it without making yourself wrong for being there.

Come find us at thereturningproject.com

Inward. Onward. Go.