In Praise of I Don’t Know

A dirt road cutting through a snowy field, late day sun warming the winter trees.

You can listen to this newsletter instead of reading it. Click the long black rectangle above these words.

Hello Dear One.

I was just reading over my notes from a course I took last fall with Nahanee Creative called, “Decolonial Mindset,” and saw that on the first day, our facilitator Ta7talíya said, “We’re all together in the unknown.”

I wrote it down. Good little student. And now, it’s six months later and I’m sitting at my desk, floating around in the big invitation of that sentence.

“We’re all together in the unknown.”

Shouldn’t every class start like that? Every coffee date, every work meeting, every morning?

What Ta7talíya was doing, brilliantly, was decolonizing the classroom, shaking off the authority of teacher status, preparing us to step into our own minds, hearts, and intuitions.

She was also signalling — don’t look for easy answers here. Decolonization isn’t a box to check; it’s a field to walk into, with willingness, humility, and wonder.

So much is unknown to all of us. It seems to me that the more something matters, the more mysterious it becomes.

Some of the questions I’ve been floating in lately:

• How to be a good friend and boss

• How to build community in a generous way without burning myself out

• How to mitigate the harms of capitalism and white supremacy on my own little acre

There’s no end to these questions. No answers. Just invitations to keep being in the asking, with willingness, humility, and wonder.

Managing the unknown is one of our central challenges as writers.

If we don’t pick it up willingly, it will always get in our way. To create anything new, we are called into a mystery. Where will the story end? Will the poem be published? Will she read it? Will it matter?

We consent to not knowing, and to creating anyway. We keep walking into the dark, with or without a flashlight.

In a world bent on fixing things, creativity requires something else from us, to put down the hammer and pick up another kind of tool. Willingness. Humility. Wonder.

I’ll always remember relationship therapist Esther Perel asking this question to a couple lost in disagreement: “Is this a problem to be solved, or a paradox to be managed?”

Oh the permission embedded in that question.

The unknowability of the world isn’t waiting for us to catch up with it. It’s just there.

So hi. To you and your questions. To you and your desire for answers. Let’s be in humility and wonder with this. Let’s celebrate everything we don’t know today, can’t know, won’t know in our lifetimes. And let’s write from there.

I’m happy to share this newsletter space with two gifted educators!

Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee is a fantastic source for understanding and taking action on decolonization.

Esther Perel has taught me so much about work and love relationships.

There’s so much we don’t know, yes, but there’s so much we can know by connecting to each other.

In it with you,