The Courage of Your Lack of Conviction: Finding Wisdom and Strength in Not Knowing

Relationships bring out the very best and very worst of us. Finding ourselves in the constant spotlight of someone else’s attention can feel alternately warming or leave us feeling we have nowhere to hide. We all have a shadow side — those parts of us we’re scared to share or even to acknowledge — but they’re remarkably hard to keep in the shadows when our partner shines that ever-so bright light of their attention on us.

A few years ago, I was in a whirlwind of a relationship. One of those ‘highest highs and lowest lows’ relationships which, when you look back, was only healthy in the sense that it forced me to confront a lot of the emotional shit I’d been trying to keep hidden, even from myself. At one point, the emotional storm led me to try throwing myself out of a tenth-storey window, but that’s a story for another day.

One of the things which put me most on edge in that relationship was the growing unease and sense of shame I felt around not having very strong political opinions. My boyfriend, whose political opinions were forged more from anger than anything else, would berate me for not having a consistent worldview. Surely, if I thought X, I must logically think Y as well — if you’re left-wing, you obviously must subscribe to all left-wing perspectives. But I didn’t, and I don’t. And a lot of the time, I just don’t have a view on a given subject at all (which is not the same thing as being uninterested).

Something was clearly wrong with me — some deficiency or laziness which would explain why I didn’t seem to have a coherent sense of the world or my place in it.

So I told my counsellor about it. He looked surprised. Why, he asked, should I feel the need to have a view on everything? Isn’t it more positive not to leap to conclusions and be able to sit comfortably in a neutral position while you learn about different perspectives and appreciate them on their own terms? Wasn’t that, after all, what I’d been trained to do as a historian when studying people and events in the past?

‘Oh’, I thought. ‘Well, yes’.

He paused, and then said something which has stuck with me ever since.

‘What if you held to the courage of your lack of conviction?’

And what a beautiful idea that is. Not to feel weakened by a sense of not knowing, but to feel empowered by it. Strengthened by the honest admission that, at least for now, you’re not sure what you think; you’re not sure you have the answer.

After all, most of the time we really don’t know if we’re right by any objective measure. So why not celebrate that lack of knowing and appreciate its qualities? There’s so many more possibilities for what might come from a lack of ‘knowing’ than there are from being deadly sure that you’ve already got all the answers.

The more you learn, the less you know; realising the scope of your ignorance is part of the process of learning. But becoming comfortable with that takes courage – a courage worth cultivating.