Post #82: We don't know what we don't know

Savasana

I've been doing yoga lately-once a week-and I find myself looking forward to it. I don't particularly enjoy the crowded, stuffy room, or the sweat that runs into my eyes, or the way my arms and legs shiver and shake when I hold a challenging pose. I do like the fact that just for an hour, I am totally focused on the things my body can do, and not the ways in which it malfunctions. At the end, as a reward, you get to do Savasana, or "corpse pose" (shudder). This is my favorite part. You're exhausted and sweaty, and completely inhabiting your body, such that you feel the heaviness of your limbs as they connect to the floor, notice the rise and fall of your chest, feel the tightness in your lower back release like air from a balloon. It is surrender.

 

At the end of the pose, which always comes too soon, the yoga teacher reads a kind of daily affirmation, with a quote and a takeaway message. I don't always remember them, but it always seems like they are applicable to my experience in some way. This could be the happy exercise endorphins, or the fact that I'm probably more receptive to this kind of stuff when I'm too tired to be snarky. We were doing a stretch and the teacher said we were basically wringing ourselves out, like a sponge. That's exactly what yoga is: as I twist and bend my body, all of the fear and negativity and worry are squeezed from my body. I never want to punch anyone after yoga.

 

All of this is a lengthy preamble to this quote I'm going to post below; you can find it (and the awesome music) here. It should come as no surprise, if you read yesterday's post, that I ate all the cookies. So many cookies. I stress ate before the Crohn's, so why should now be any different? I mentioned that I was frustrated with myself for perpetuating this cycle, of doing the "normal" things I did before and expecting-hoping for-different results. I'm frustrated again tonight (and nauseous!), and then I found this quote. It's exactly what I needed. Yoga AND an Internet affirmation? Today was a good day.

I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould.

 

But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don’t know what I don’t know. There are universes of things out there — ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions — that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don’t know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered.

 

Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can’t help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives.

 

[…]

 

I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown.

 

Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we don’t know that we don’t know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. … In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown.

 

You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you won’t know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete.

This, just this, I am comfortable not knowing.

 

-Debbie Millman (previously) in Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design