What do you know? (Or not?)
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0:00 Hello, newsletter crew. I've been feeling the pull to get in touch, and it's just been busy. But I can feel things starting to shift and calm down.
0:17 And I don't know about you all, but it feels a little, I don't know, chaotic. It feels like popcorn.
0:25 It feels like there's like things happening and I don't quite know what they are yet, and I don't know how they're going to land, and this is my first year with a little one getting out of school, so it feels like you know the whole schedule gets blown up like I know lots of you have experienced for years
0:41 And I had a bunch of work and travel and it feels like that's calming down and I don't really know what's next. But I did have this this idea come through recently that I thought was interesting and I've been sitting with and I thought you might all appreciate. Which is that, you know, a long time ago,
1:00 a friend of mine, we were talking about, like, sort of things that you things that you believe you know, what do you believe no matter what, anything else? And he said something about, to know is better than not to know. And I thought, oh you know at the time I was like oh yeah I guess that kind of makes sense
1:16 You know, that's like just a truism. But I've been sitting with lately with this idea of like, what if to not know is better in some situations than to know? I find that really interesting. I find it very different from, I think, the way that our culture, at least in the Western world,
1:39 tends to want to know and understand and be able to have a decision. And the reason it's interesting to me, first, it kind of connects to the curiosity idea. Like, as long as you think you know and you have the answer you're basically no longer curious.
1:57 That's a question I ask myself a lot when I'm sitting with clients is, do I think I know the answer? And if I do, I'm not really curious anymore. So there's something about needing to not know to be able to be curious and ask questions and be open. And also you know a lot of my work and work that the people I love do
2:19 is around just the mystery and the unknown and what do we do when we come up against that, right?
2:27 The other thing about it, the way it came up personally, was just I was you know I was talking to this really lovely group of entrepreneurs that I sit in and have started recently, and I was saying I had some ideas and some thoughts about how the summer was going to go.
2:46 And what I thought it was going to mean based on what I had seen before and expectations and assumptions I was making. And one of them said, very wisely, you might not know, right?
2:59 Like, that might not be how it turns out. Do you want to create space to be wrong and to have something else happen there? And it was such a good reminder of how many times that we get caught in our own thinking that we know and then we sort of create that situation, right?
3:16 Whether we want to or not. So I also feel like this idea of not knowing and sort of purposefully staying in the not knowing just leaves a lot more options open. It creates more space. And, you know, I'm not thinking of this in the way, like, of course there's sometimes, there's like a deep knowing for me
3:38 I talk about it that way. Or there's like a pull or there's like a yes this or no that. And I still really trust that, but I almost want a different word for that because to me knowing is very like mental, it's like I've decided that this is the thing and this is the way it works
3:58 and I know how it works. And this is a little more like, I want to admit that I don't know things so I can be curious and there's more options open and then you know I can still, I can still commit and say yes or no clearly to things that I feel inside of myself. But also I don't need to know why.
4:22 That's the other thing I think is up. Like, I really want to do this and I feel like I need to come up with a bunch of reasons so I know why this is the right thing to do. That was the other thing I was reminded of yesterday, of like sometimes you can just want to do a thing,
4:36 you don't really have to have a good reason. And it's okay to push in that direction and experiment. Anyway, that's what's up for me.
4:44 I hope you all are doing well. I'd love to hear from you all. Yeah, take care. you
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