What If All The Answers Lie In Not Knowing Any Answers At All?
Our pursuit of understanding is what’s keeping us from understanding in the first place.
Do you ever feel a compulsion to understand something that is just outside your ability to comprehend? It’s the intellectual equivalent to jumping on a dense, puffy white cloud and expecting it to hold your weight. You know it’s not possible, but your desire for it to be so superseded your ability to accept that it cannot be, so you desperately try anyway on the off-chance it might work.
That’s heavy, so let’s try a real-world example:
Love.
Look at love relationships: love triggers primal human needs, like belonging, security, and connection. These needs reveal our dependence on that which we cannot truly understand and rationalize, and we hate it. Understanding is the puffy white cloud. We can exist before it, through it, and beyond it, but it can’t hold our weight. We want it to take shape and fulfill our expectations of what it represents, but in the end, it transcends worldly meaning. It can’t hold us. In short, there is no such thing as understanding.
In a desperate effort to define what we can’t understand, we turn outward. In relationships, our need for understanding is really just…
