Unknowns

Life is experience. Plain and simple. We breathe in and exhale. Our bodies survive moment to moment, longer spans stretching into decades and many of those. We smile and frown. We feel hope and dread. We are happy at times and sad at other times. Elated now and again. Dashed in spirit also now and again. With each experience we learn something. Know something. We even piece some of these together with other groups of experiences, and voila! We discover yet more meanings, or at least, the possibilities of more meanings.

Yes. We experience. We learn. We come to know. And yet, when honesty and openness are allowed to persist side by side, we know that we know very little. Much is yet unknown.

Surprisingly, I know some things you do not. You know some things I do not. Whole groups of people feel this same distance. Nations even. Age groups, too. Genders. And a host of combinations of those selectors.

The unknown. Knowing the unknown. Being aware that we have imperfect knowledge of life and all of its many meanings. That doesn’t stop us from assuming otherwise, or at least pretending to know what we do not.

Interesting. Even more weighty when we realize that we make sense of things when we feel capable, then learn we truly do not know how to make sense with those specifics. Struggling to know is one thing. Acting as though we do is yet another. Profoundly different.

Knowing can be false as well. We don’t know that we are wrong in our understanding, but we feel confident we know something all the while we do not. False expectations come from this and often explode in our realities when least expected. It is hard to realize how wrong we were. Embarrassing is one emotion that pops to mind.

We are tempted to avoid such moments in the future. To do that we shy away from dealing with unknowns. We don’t struggle to understand. We accept or ignore whatever is placed before us. Unthinking and unfeeling, we move on with life ignoring the larger pieces of life and their unknowns. Instead of mystery, we see impossible challenge. We let others handle this. We even rely on others to do this for us.

And therein lies the trouble. Unchallenged, we easily maintain ignorance. We let the complicated things be managed by others. Do we trust them? Not the question. Do we believe them? Again, not the question. How do we know they are believable and trustable? We don’t have the specifics to judge, do we? Without the work of examining, reading, exploring and studying, we allow others to run our lives and our institutions unchecked. Their biases and manipulations are free to function against our interests.

This is my life. This is your life. We make of it as we will. We invest in it for broader outcomes and opportunities. We cannot safely give this up to unknown others. It is our job to do.

And yet, we read the news every day of the opposite. If we don’t like that, we can do something about it. But it takes work and conscious decisions to be involved and committed to knowing as much as we can digest.

Do we have a fully functioning democracy? Is Congress functioning well in our land? Is the Supreme Court worthy of that name? If not, what are you going to do about it? And why haven’t you?

April 29, 2024

 

 

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