It's Okay to Not Know: That's Facts.

Letter to a young man on religion (inspired by Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," and one strong cup of caffeinated coffee)

Dear Graham,

Thank you for your thoughtful email. I’ll just work my way through your holy words, this gospel of Graham you’ve written to me. I’m not sure how directly I’ll speak to your questions about religion, but I trust that somehow I’ll get to the heart of what you’re asking about. We’ll see what happens.

“Hey Andrew,” you write, “I am a senior in high school about to go off into college blindly and without a core set of beliefs.”

Great start. Love it.

“I was gifted your book, Walking to Listen, on my 18th birthday last June and have been slowly reading it in my free time away from homework. I realized that I’m very confused about what I should believe in,”

also great, also loving it,

“which is a big reason why I decided to open up your book: to educate myself on different opinions.”

Well, first off, I’m honored to be a companion in your education. You are a part of mine now, as well. Google tells me the word “educate” comes from the Latin educere, meaning “to bring out, to lead forth.” Wouldn’t that be beautiful, if education (and religion, too, for that matter) really, actually was about leading each other forth, bringing each other out? May it be so. May my words beckon into your consciousness more of who you are, as you are beckoning this email out of me.  

In your very first sentence I am struck most by your self-awareness. The awareness that you can’t quite see everything (or maybe can’t see anything at all): this is its own kind of vision. Can you feel that? To know that you don’t know is itself valuable knowledge, and rare knowledge in a society so thoroughly convinced of its capacity to know things. Your ability to not know (and I do think it’s an ability) will serve you better in your navigation of reality’s mysteries than anything you think you know, IMHO.

Who among us can really know anything, I wonder. We can’t explain much. To explain something, to understand it completely, we’d have to explain its origin, where it came from, the vast and infinite network of causalities that gave rise to its being, a network which eventually leads us back to the origin of all things, and who would dare to claim any understanding of that? We can tell stories about the Beginning (a primordial Big Bang, a divine Garden of Eden), but no matter how we try to grok it we encounter inscrutable, impenetrable, indomitable mystery. Our stories, our beliefs, cannot explain away the fundamental mystery of things. If it’s God, well: God is a mystery, no? If the universe was once just hot, tiny particles mixed together with energy and light that then spontaneously blew up into this ever-expanding universe: is that not a mystery? Where did those tiny particles come from? The energy? The light? What was before the Beginning?

Who can honestly say? Who walks unblindfolded here in this mystery called the universe? To be human is to be blindfolded, is to not see the entirety of any given thing, any given moment. To know that, to be aware of it, is to see. To not know it, and to believe we’re seeing, is ignorance.

There’s always something we don’t see, haven’t understood, can’t understand, so many unknown layers and dimensions that are always at play in the present moment. To give you just one very practical example: we don’t know the great catalogue of experiences that our grandparents lived through, which shaped how they viewed and inhabited the world, the memories of which now live on in us, echoing throughout our own psyche and genome as the traits we come to identify as the signature of our own persona: our trademark solemnity, that anxiety we can’t seem to get rid of, our hilarity, our depression. These were forged in the fires of lives lit and extinguished long ago. And then there are our great-grandparents to consider, and what they lived through, and our great-great-grandparents, and so on all the way back to that unknowable beginning of all things.

We are, in other words, quite blindfolded as to the why and how of even the most seemingly ordinary thing. There’s so much we just don’t know.

I think it’s okay to not know. In my unprofessional opinion, I-don’t-know might be the most solid ground we have to stand upon when it comes to honestly occupying our place here in the world. We are most truthful, or we make ourselves most available to whatever the truth might be, when we can allow ourselves to not know and, instead, simply align with the reality of the unknown. The moment you decide you know something (or someone) once and for all is the moment you can’t learn anything new about it (or them). I tend not to trust people who claim to know things with complete certainty, the ones who say, “This is what things are and this is why.” Or maybe it’s not that I don’t trust them, but simply that I take note of their limitations. Not all of us can tolerate the pressure and the dark and the unfathomable vastness of this mystery ocean we call creation, which we are, which we can know only insofar as we dare to know ourselves, feel ourselves, experience more of and all of and only ever ourselves. 

Not knowing does not mean not caring. If anything, not knowing something (a relationship, a tree, anything at all in this Garden of Eden, this big banging expansion of energy and matter) only magnifies the wonder of it, and the humility to be in the presence of it, and the awe. What is this thing I call a banana? What is this thing I feel called jealousy, called joy, called fear, called beauty? Who is that in the mirror? Who are you?

I am writing these words to you as a field biologist might sketch the image of an owl he sees in the woods. I’ve spent some time studying the owl, and I can sketch well enough to my liking on this morning of caffeinated confidence. However, the fact remains that I don’t know what the owl actually is. I don’t know what the owl knows. I don’t know how the owl came to be. The owl is the Big Bang, bursting forth into feathery, taloned form in this moment of eternity. The owl is God’s dream. I can see the owl, sure, and I can sketch her, but my seeing and sketching don’t change the fact that the owl is a total mystery to me.

I think it bears repeating: your ability to identify that you’re not aware of certain things (your self-described blindness), and your willingness to articulate that, suggests to me that you are, in fact, seeing as clearly as you possibly can.

But don’t believe me. See if you can feel that for yourself. And if it doesn’t feel true (if not-knowing feels like an unclear, muddling experience to you), well, there’s no shame in feeling entirely muddied. I’ve been pretty muddy myself these past few months, wondering and worrying about my career and my finances and my purpose. Anxiety, bro. It’s a tough one.

But in my view, or in the view I endeavor to hold, everything is worth our diligent and delicate efforts to get to know it, including the anxiety, the judgment, each and every shadow. Why? Because what else are we supposed to do with our time here if not submit ourselves to learning from the relationships that present themselves to us, inside and out?

So, those are my thoughts about you “go(ing) off into college blindly and without a core set off beliefs.”

As for your core set of beliefs, and the issue of not having them: is it true that you don’t have them, that you haven’t yet encountered them, that they aren’t living within you and through you right now, guiding you, moving you in every moment? Something is moving you, isn’t it, inspiring you, directing the flow of your energy and attention? What it is, at the core? What is the core? Where is it? Who lives there? Is it something you know or something you feel? Or is it something you just are? We have our whole lives to ask these questions. To live them, like Rilke says. If you haven’t read his “Letters to a Young Poet” yet, I’d get on that ASAP.

Graham, I hope my words have been useful to you. If nothing else, it has been useful for me to write them, so I have to thank you for that. I haven’t even gotten to your questions about religion yet, and about whether my walk across America was motivated by a religious impulse. But maybe I have spoken about religion, in a sideways kind of way. One thing is for sure: I’ve gone on long enough. For now, I’d love to hear what these words “bring forth” in you, what they “lead out,” if anything, and I’ll circle back to religion another day, another cup of caffeinated coffee. Or maybe I’d better do decaf next time. 

Peace,

Andrew

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