I don't know
I love a good mystery be it a book, a TV series, or a movie. Where I haven't always loved mystery is in my personal life. Uncertainty feels unsafe. There’s something unsettling and ungrounded when I’m in that liminal space; or as Mastin Kipp calls it “living in the maybe.” I don’t know is just a hard place to be.
As a culture, we aren’t encouraged to embrace the mystery. There’s an expectation that we should always know the answer. As a child in school, I was often shamed for not knowing the answer to a question when called on by the teacher. And the pressure to have the answers only became greater the older I got. As an adult in a profession, I was expected to have an answer when questioned by a boss, a vendor, or a client.
Never did I feel as much pressure to know the answer as when I was struggling with whether to stay in or leave my marriage. Most of this pressure came from me. Seeing my husband at the time wrestle with the emotions of a failing marriage and a troubled wife was heartbreaking. I felt like I needed to make a decision now to bring him some peace. But that would have been doing a disservice to him and me, and our 14-year marriage.
My ex-husband doesn’t really do maybe and I don’t know. He moves through life with a lot of speed, force, and determination, filling all the available space. At least he did then. Understandably, he wanted answers to fill the uncertain space that lay open between us. While part of me wanted to give him an answer—for him and for me because it was an uncomfortable situation—I had to get really comfortable with saying “I don’t know.”
There are two different kinds of I don’t know. The desperate kind of I don’t know that creates incredible pressure and an obsessive mind-wracking search for the answer. This I don’t know will lead you to grasp at a decision that will relieve the pressure and put your mind at ease—hopefully. But by grasping at an answer in this state, you’re limited to only the possibilities your mind can imagine, and those are usually either/or options. Limited indeed.
And then there’s the other, less popular kind of I don’t know, which is simply to surrender to the mystery. By surrendering, you create space within yourself for the right answer to come to you rather than rushing to a decision for decision’s sake. When you can trust that the right answer will come to you at the right time, the pressure eases. And when you can allow the uncertainty to just be, you create space for a lot more possibility.
I eventually surrendered to I don’t know. For months I lived in that liminal space, trusting that I would know the answer when it came to me. And it did. In the shower one morning, this thought rose to the surface of my consciousness: “I don’t want to wish 10 years from now that I had left the marriage 10 years ago.” That was 9 years ago and I have never questioned the certainty of that knowing.
Here’s something you should know about living in the maybe and waiting for the right answer to reveal itself: When the answer does come, it will come from your essential self and that always sounds kind and loving, never unkind or frantic. That’s what my answer sounded like to me that morning in the shower—quiet, calm, and kind.
You’ll also know the right answer when it comes to you by how it feels. It will feel like peace in your soul.