The power in acknowledging and then openly admitting!😯 boldly and unapologetically, that I DON’T KNOW was first revealed to me many years back by Joyce Meyer.

At that time I was utterly gobsmacked by the suggestion that I didn’t need to know, because I’d previously been led to believe that my survival depended on it.

As I wrote in a previous post :

“most of us have been conditioned to know, and when we didn’t, we learned very quickly not to make it known that we didn’t know. Or we’d play along like we did know, only to convince ourselves that we actually knew what we certainly did not know but had been faking for so long that we were no longer aware that we were faking and now believed we DID know.”

Dysfunctional survival tactics and mistaken beliefs courtesy of my upbringing, which I am acknowledging rather than sonofabitching. Not that I’ve never sonofabitched it, it is part of the healing process after all, but eventually I chose not to disempower my current self further by clinging indefinitely to the losses by focusing on the gains.

I would eventually come to the realization that an expectation for anyone to obtain and teach skills that are essentially non-existent in their particular realm of awareness is a senseless waste of my energy, so I gradually moved on, recognizing that they did the best they could with the information they had at that time, oblivious to their emotional immaturity, just as I was to mine. 😴

Until I wasn’t. 👁

My work began there and continues. In perpetuity.

Obviously there are things I would have perceived and handled differently if I’d had the knowledge and tools at the time to do so, especially as a parent, but I didn’t yet possess them. I choose to believe the same regarding my parents and am hopeful that my children will extend me that same grace.

In her thought-provoking new book The Let Them Theory (I highly recommend) Mel Robbins (who posits that she is the reason all 3 of her children require therapy) sums it up beautifully when speaking about the inability of adults to process their emotions in a healthy way:

“So I just assume that most adults have never learned how to process their emotions in a healthy way, because no one’s parents knew how to do this either, and if yours did, then you are one lucky person. A child cannot learn how to do this on their own. Like I said earlier, it’s a skill that takes time, practice, and a desire to learn.” -Mel Robbins

And while she’s speaking of processing emotions in that paragraph, the same can be said for any facet of your upbringing that didn’t provide you with skills that could be serving you solidly now if you had received them then.

But you didn’t.

Oh well.

Not your fault.

Still your problem.

YOUR responsibility.

Wait a sec- did I just veer off course again? I’ll circle back to the main point:

Not knowing is not a deficit. It’s an open-ended opportunity for learning.

3 items that I read this morning:

• Einstein and Adam Grant Agree: The Puzzle Principle Will Make You Smarter
• 3 Subtle Traits of Successful Late Bloomers
• “I Don’t Know What to Do with My Life”

were all reminders to me of this premise, so that was my tap from the universe to share.

We don’t need to know everything.

We just need to continually cultivate an inherent desire to learn and the flexibility of mind to acknowledge and adapt as we’re led.

Again and again.

“The more I know, the less I understand
All the things I thought I figured out, I have to learn again
I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter
But everything changes
And my friends seem to scatter
But I think it’s about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore…” song by Don Henley, Mike Campbell, JD Souther