I Do Know

My not knowing or understanding a how or why, exposes the limits of my cognition. Further analysis or study might expand my limits, but until I do know, I simply don’t.

Can I decide the space identified as unknown to me, is something?

If I don’t know how you made that card disappear, can I say you are a magician? If I do, am I not simply avoiding the harsh reality that I simply don’t know how you did it?

Obviously, my ignorance does not make the act magic. And yet, we have a word “magic” to stand in for “sleight of hand” and “I don’t know how you did that.”

For fundamental existential questions like how we came to be, or if there’s a why we’re here, when we don’t know a certifiable answer, we name that unknown. For the gnawing question of whether there’s anything or anyone else in the universe besides carbon and iron, we name the unknown. As if the lack of an answer somehow creates one. As if by naming the unknown, we’ve changed something.

Answering these spaces with “god” or “alien life” – terms whose inherent definition is “I don’t know or understand them” – is effectively replacing one “I don’t know” with another.

I don’t know why that happened.

God made it happen.

Maybe aliens are the reason.

All three represent and identify a space I can’t explain. But two of them we creatively dress and fluff up, forgetting that they are merely placeholder words, not actual beings.

Some or many of us are uncomfortable sitting with “I don’t know”, so we objectify and personify it into an entity; naming it, imagining it, and thereby deluding ourselves into knowing it exists. Even if I acknowledge that I can’t know the “I don’t know” because it’s more powerful than me, I’m subconsciously aware that I created it by naming it, and I control and own it. I get the desired comfort level of knowing and controlling the unknown. Then, the repeated and conditioning use of our named “I don’t know” makes it a reality of sorts to us. We project onto it form, function, meaning, and importance. We relate to it and it to us. All of this is imagined into reality, for us and by us.

And just like that, instead of us being clueless, we’re magicians?

Nah.

I do know. That I don’t know. And I can live with that.