The older I get and the more I think I know, the more I realize how little I actually do.
It’s humbling. Scary. Weird.
It’s also epic and beautiful and a point of entry into a world that offers us unlimited potential. But it requires us to go to those places we just don’t want to go.
The Unknown. Dum Dum Dum.
In a world where everything is immediately searchable on Google, and we can get pretty much anywhere we want to go, and there are APPs for everything, and we expect things instantaneously, is it any wonder that the unknown and all it represents will feel even more alien to us?
And yet”¦
Everything you have ever achieved in life ”“ from falling in love, to pursuing a life in the arts, to moving to a new city ”“ has come from your willingness to step into the unknown.
It’s the journey of our forefathers and ancestral cousins. It’s in our DNA. Partly as survival ”“ man has constantly moved from one location to somewhere else in the pursuit of a better, more sustainable or hospitable life. Sometimes, that was driven by sheer instinct, sometimes out of the curiosity of, “What if”¦?”
I’m not sure why it’s constructed this way. Perhaps for each of us to learn individually that by stepping into that which is scary and foreign, we discover our innate talents. We develop character. We exercise faith. We lean into our strength.
We learn how to trust. We let go more and more.
Or maybe it’s not even that deep. Maybe it’s just by taking action, by committing ”“ the things we want start coming to us. We take more risks, show up to our lives in a more demonstrable way, and stop waiting for something to happen and instead go out and do it instead.
The irony is that it’s all unknown anyway. As much as humanity has been trying to know and understand the cosmos (and our place in it) ”“ from Galileo to Einstein ”“ there are still so many mysteries that remain unsolved. If astronomers estimate that there are more than one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, how can we ever truly know? (And that’s just in the observable universe!)
To walk hand-in-hand with our own fallible, fragile and yet powerful selves in a place that is inherently unknowable, at the same time, can create greater freedom to live more wildly in the unknown-ness of it all.
We come from there, after all. The unknown.
So let your life be a greater reflection of that principle which is driving the entire universe anyway. And when you do, you perhaps will get glimpses into the mysteries that all of humanity has been searching for since the world began.
Actors in video: Erika Rankin and Chad Buchanan