Knowing the Unknowable

 “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
― David Foster Wallace

 All the stuff and things we learn over time create who we have been, who we are, and who we become. As in any discipline, like say math... we must understand simple addition and subtraction before moving on to more complicated equations, and then onto complex descriptions and searching of life itself, in reasoning, problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity.

Anything we come to understand should be practiced continually - it's not just an ah-ha moment of clarity that allows you to sit and know something forever after... there is always more to know and with practice it becomes easier to apply in daily life. When I understood stoicism and why patience is seen as a virtue, it became a difficult daily practice, it still is. An understanding of valuable qualities, virtues, lie beyond the gamut of factual information; even factual information can change with newly discovered data or evidence.

We walk a tightrope of knowledge and awareness above a sea of confusion and fear, and clinging to anything as an ultimate truth may be our downfall; because hanging onto something that seems knowable now may not work out the same way later on. 

It is with this overarching appreciation of always-feasible change that we can navigate our presence with what we've discovered so far, and, without feeling attached to our discoveries, we know that the potential for future revelation is available. We build upon our studies, our epiphanies, our ways of looking at the world - each time, we amend our previous perceptions with fresh experience and determinations.

This is how we know the unknowable, with open minds and big hearts. All the glimpses of worldly beauty and universal possibility we perceive are pointers to a much larger existence - we humans don't even know half of what's going on, and understanding that in itself is half the battle. Resting in transitional growth keeps the anxiety of not knowing in an applicable and knowable space.

 

 

 


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