Exams, dating, parenting … whatever life throws our way, there will be uncertainty and surprises. The sooner we accept that, the happier we will be
If we want to build a better life, we have to be able to not know. Does that sound confusing? Perhaps you don’t know what I’m talking about? Good! That’s great practice.
If you cannot tolerate not knowing, you run the risk of arranging your life so you can know everything (or at least try to), and you may end up sapping your existence of any spontaneity and joy. You don’t ever have the experience of exploring a new place and discovering something exciting, because you’ve already Googled it. And you don’t give a new relationship a chance to develop because you’ve already written that person off. You plan the life out of your life, and your only enjoyment comes from things working out exactly as you knew they would.
Being able to not know, for the poet John Keats (and the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who quoted him), means being “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. It gives rise to a state of mind in which your thoughts can wander and wonder, you can be curious, have feelings, and out of those feelings can grow thoughts, and you can dream and test out ideas and explore.
