Making Friends With Not-Knowing

If you can handle the uncertainty, Mystery is a juicy place to be

“The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.”
–Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey, “Departure”

In 1996 I did the unthinkable (for me): I walked away at the height of a twenty-year career teaching at one of the most prestigious schools in Boston. I left the comfort of a senior position, a monthly paycheck with full benefits, a community that had been family to me, and leapt head first into a terrifying void I call Not Knowing.

Pulling the plug on my life as I knew it was no small thing for someone so tightly wired to routine, a professional identity, and financial security. I had no plan for my future, no clue what would unfold. Recurring nightmares that year found me back in the school hallways either lost, late for class, or standing in front of my students…stark naked.

I was forty-two years old at the time. I had married the man of my dreams, attained a Master’s Degree at a prominent New England University, taught at the most distinguished prep school, traveled around the world, bought the dream home in one of the most historic towns in America. I had survived three years of invasive infertility treatments and beaten the odds by giving birth to the most perfect, healthy baby girl.

I had everything I wanted yet this abundance of riches somehow didn’t translate into inner peace or joy. I didn’t know who I was anymore or what I loved. All I knew was that some part of me was slowly dying or would surely die if something didn’t change…like soon.

Mind you, the realization to leave my job did not arrive as fully-formed moment of clarity, like those ah-ha bulbs that light up over your head. My “notice” arrived inelegantly–like a battering rod to my body–in the form of a severe case of the flu that was to last the better part of four weeks. My wake-up call was a month-long event of non-stop coughing, feverish thrashing in bed, and complete despair over the fact that nothing seemed to fix this “thing” I had. It was a healing crisis that showed I was seriously out of step with my true self.

My approach to any life challenge at that time had always followed a logical sequence: If something doesn’t work, you fix it. You figure it out. You force or will it to change if you have to. You do something about it. I had no concept that my body, in its infinite wisdom, knew exactly what it was doing to heal and rebalance itself. Bodies, like homes, are in a constant state of rebalancing all the time, creating and adjusting as they dance with the choices we make and the laws of nature. My job was to get out of the way!

I know of no handbook that shows you how to deconstruct and re-shape a life; no natural follow-the-dot sequence that takes you gently by the hand from point A to B. For a year after I quit teaching, I simply followed my nose and improvised my life, sometimes doing things that made my heart sing, sometimes making lame stabs at clearing out a drawer, sometimes doing things that made no sense at all. Though uncomfortable at times, the task of unwinding from a lifetime of nonstop “doing” was not all that unnatural or foreign or difficult, even if it did feel cludgy in a baby-step sort of way.

What I wasn’t prepared for, and posed as my biggest challenge to an otherwise orderly approach to reinvention, was the loosey-gooseyness of unscheduled time, the guilt of having time for myself, the spasms of worry over how it’s all going to add up, or what happens now, what happens next… who the heck am I?

I had gone from students, schedules, and sure things to wandering about in a foggy netherworld of empty space––that place of pure untapped potential that my higher self was no doubt giddy to explore (and had somehow orchestrated). My mind on the other hand, doing what it does when it has to have things fit and figured out now, went bonkers.

When we make space in our lives—by conscious choice or not—it is possible to enter a period of deep unknowing, where nothing we do or experience makes any sense in the context of what preceded it; where our vital connections seem completely lost. We may even hit the proverbial wall and splatter all over the floor, as I have done so many times in my life.

Perhaps there is something going on in your life right now that doesn’t quite add up. Or there’s an issue that eludes you, or remains unsolved or unclear. A person you just can’t quite figure out. A situation that leaves a bad taste in your mouth and you can’t put your finger on. A clear desire to bolt a situation or a person that no longer supports you.

This is that fuzzy place that I’m talking about. A messy place I call Mystery.

There’s a wonderful poem written by the famous German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (when he was all of twenty-seven years old) that sustains and inspires me whenever I find myself, yet again, hanging out in the fog. Written as a letter in 1903 to an aspiring young poet, the passage contains a universal truth that speaks volumes to all of us:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love
The questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in
a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because
you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now, and perhaps you will then gradually,
without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
––Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, “Letter Four”
Translated by M.D. Herter Norton, New York, 1954

Rilke’s poem invites us to accept not knowing as a legitimate state of being; to experience the mystery of these moments as little flower buds that cannot be rushed or forced or seen. Yet.

Instead of rushing for an answer, what would it feel like to simply allow things to be just as they are: unresolved, unexplainable, messy, mysterious…? What would it feel like to navigate life’s twists and turns and seeming dead-ends without doing anything to fix, change or manage the outcome?

Not-knowing is a very juicy place in which to hang out if you can bear the uncertainty and discomfort of it. I have found these periods in my life to be powerful and creative—dark and messy and exasperating a lot of the time, but rich, like black soil that fosters new growth. When and if I stop long enough and allow these moments in my life to simply be, I notice that there is a certain something happening…a wee awareness poking through that suggests a shift is taking place.

A pleasant surprise.

(Originally published at GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, Stephanie Bennett Vogt).