Practicing Not Knowing

Yesterday I met a man who told me he came "this close" to attempting suicide because he felt unsure about whether or not to pursue a divorce.  This individual was caught in the in-between-ness of not knowing, and it felt intolerable.

Buddhist author Pema Chodron warns us that "as a species, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort."  And what creates more discomfort in human beings than not knowing? Not knowing the direction to take. Go left? Go right? Stay straight.  Turn around. Why did that happen? Why did she say that? What did he mean by that? How did I get here? We hate not knowing all the answers to our questions and what's more, we hate waiting for the answers.

Dr. Seuss called this spot "the waiting place" in his book "Oh the Places You'll Go." When we are neither here nor there Dr. Seuss assures us "the waiting place" is not only inevitable but will actually be often in life, something you can actually count on happening episodically throughout the life span. And during those times when there seems to be no forward movement, we can choose to handle it in one of three ways.

A., We can bang our head against the wall searching tirelessly for our answer and/or for this waiting period to end though the whole pursuit proves fruitless.

B., We can just make some arbitrary, and sometimes impulsive, decision just to move us out of the land of limbo and into something else. Of course this choice is a crap shoot at best and often filled with regret because we made a choice based in fear and discomfort rather than wisdom and equanimity.

C. Though this is the most difficult, and often in the moment the least desirable, here we learn to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing. In this choice we come face to face with the at times excruciating quality of the wait.  Here we accept the mystery and the reality that an answer may never come.

This last one, choice C, is extremely hard one for me, and clearly for the man I met yesterday too. I am someone who becomes restless easily when the scenery does not change often enough.  Sometimes I get this itch I can't scratch if I literally am stuck in geographical stay-put-ed-ness. There are also times of uncertainty and unknowing in my various life spheres like job non-security in a very precarious time for healthcare, or what the future holds for the health of my aging parent. Sometimes it is hard for me to tolerate even the amount of time it takes for a call back from my daughter's pediatrician.  I get this helpless, powerless feeling that makes me just want to take action, any action, rather than practice acceptance and wait.

But I'll tell you, when I'm really struggling, I can take it global. I can take my bewilderment and worry about the unanswerable questions  to world wide problems like the war in Iraq and Syria and climate change. Wondering how will this all go? What are the solutions? How will we get there? And in the meantime, how do I tolerate this period of limbo in which we are neither here nor there because that is where the suffering comes in, right? The suffering that Buddhism tells us is the automatic tendency of human beings.  The suffering I experience when forced to bear the experience and pain of indefinite stillness and sameness without explanation. When our "why" just hangs out there in the wind.

But whilst Ms. Chodron (can you refer to a nun as Ms.?) is kind of warning us humans about what we are up against in terms of our aversion to unknowing. In comes poet Rainer Maria Rilke who offers us, me anyway, some comfort instead of a warning. Rilke too seems aware of the human difficulty to tolerate the unknown waiting spaces in our lives and minds and hearts, but he says it is not only possible to get through, but there can be sacred value in the process. Rilke says:

"Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live then. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers."

Although I must say here to be fair to Pema Chodron, she does offer a suggestion for practicing, and getting better at, tolerating the discomfort: meditation of course!

But here on this day, I think I'm going to just try to internalize Rilke's words and leave it there. It could be because I've been up the last few night with my newborn whose got a bad cold. Could be just the pure exhaustion which I believe can be the physical state that sometimes allows us to surrender to what is already there. To what we already know is true. We stop resisting reality.

And, ok, I'll keep meditating too!

Here's to practicing not knowing. Good luck to us all!