“You don’t know everything. You just have to find it when necessary.” ~ John Brunner

Amidst the many things that we do, day in and day out, there are bound to be some things that we have no clue about.

There are these blank moments where you only have one phrase running through your mind: I don’t know.

Suddenly, your world of knowledge, wisdom, and ideas becomes a big zero.

“A zero itself is nothing, but without a zero, you cannot count anything; therefore, a zero is something, yet zero.” ~ Dalai Lama

Then begins the worry, the panic, and perhaps frustration. 

“Why don’t I know this?” “How could I not know?!” “What do I do now?!”

Interestingly, this state of affairs prepares the base for some new ideas and insights.

In essence, it’s this zero that leads to more permutations and combinations.

There is nothing as absolute as knowing or not knowing. With so much information that we keep receiving and filtering constantly, we do know something about everything.

How and when we use it depends on what knocks on that particular department of our mind.

So this “I don’t know” is not really a genuine state of “not knowing.” It’s a state wherein the mind switches off its active mode to secretly work on “knowing” what the issue is and what needs to be done at the moment.

“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” ~ Rosalia de Castro

And then comes a flash—a sudden shift in perception, called insight—where everything falls into place, and we seem to have just the right solution for everything!

Something within us simply expands to make room for something new or, at times, something familiar yet not acknowledged.

“We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it?” ~ Yaa Gyasi

This state of not knowing is actually quite interesting. You know that you don’t know. Yet, you also know that the answer will come for sure.

It’s a phase of incubation. A phase where the instinctive part of us is working actively to create a shift within us while the logical part is busy grappling with the day-to-day realities.

So while we know that we don’t know, we know that the answer is already within us.

Sometimes it takes longer and sometimes just a moment to switch from “I don’t know” to “I know.”

“Being at ease with not knowing is essential for answers to come to you.” ~ Eckhart Tolle