In the absence of knowing, there is not-knowing.
Knowing is easy: acquired knowledge requires a bit of occasional maintenance, enough to shake out the creases and maybe tape up a tear or two, but it accumulates, steadfast and quiet.
Not-knowing is the dangerous part, the live wire, the vast ocean.
Uncharted.
The end of last year blindsided me; I was looking at the finger for years while it pointed at the moon. (ref) I thought I knew what I didn’t know: the shape of the empty space in my heart, the path forward, the time signature of my own happiness, the tight limits of my courage.
In spite of those certainties, I dove squarely into the unknown. I thought it would be like a Bugs Bunny high-dive into a hopelessly small pool – so sure I was that I knew the doomed end of the story! – but I found myself swept out to such a sea as I had never, ever seen.
The standard of evidence for a criminal conviction in Texas is reasonable doubt; truth has been defined as “[f]irm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.” They are fitting counterparts – being able to maintain the near-certainty of firm belief is mandatory in order to make a space the right size for reasonable doubt. But what about all the unreasonable doubts that drift in those unknown waters?
My life has certainly been full of unreasonable events; given the circumstances of my birth, I could argue that my existence itself is unreasonable, improbable, unlikely. Iffy, but not in a Cartesian sense.
The primal selfishness at the core of the human animal, the greed and jealousy and competition that probably rule all of our decisions and display themselves so gracefully in our unreasonable actions…how can we pretend it away? Reason it into a cage? Act as if our social contracts provide any protection from ourselves?
How is it possible to find firm beliefs when all of your certainties are backed by these unreasonable things that give rise to the fear of more unreasonable happenings?
And yet:
Those risks I took, the strokes alone out into the open water, brought me to the thing I always wanted but thought I’d never find.
Six days at the end of the year redefined everything I thought was possible in this world and reopened a secret part of my heart that was walled in but still beating.
Letting go has always been the choice it took to get to the next step.
But isn’t that in itself unreasonable? Or am I just a coward?