There’s a fantasy that we’re supposed to know what to do with our lives. And if we don’t then this is clear evidence that something is wrong with us, that we’ve failed, or done life wrong.
At times the soul will reach us through its intermediaries of uncertainty, hopelessness, and confusion, by way of that liminal middle place where the visitors of doubt, contradiction, and disappointment are the gatekeepers to the garden of the beloved.
While we may have a bias toward the upward, the light, and the clear, love does not seem to share this bias and will send her emissaries of the downward, the dark, and the unclear to reach and open us.
At times we must marinate and wait in the darker, lunar shades of the spectrum which are not reachable by way of cultural trance or a happy-happy upward solar-based self-help industry which has pathologized the wisdom of the darker, lunar, muddy, and descendent.
But before we turn from the non-conventional allies of confusion and doubt, let us slow down and reimagine. In a world that is fixated with doing, with answers, and with resolving the contradictions and wildness of the human being, we must remember that death is required for new forms of love and creativity to emerge.
The middle period, too, is holy, and is an honorable, non-negotiable region of the soul that is no less sacred. “Lost” is another arrow in the quiver of the beloved, equally valid to “found,” and one of the ways the beloved calls us nearer.
As an experiment, you could say out loud, with the earth as your witness, “I don’t know.” And give yourself permission to not-know, for now, without any shame, judgment, or pressure to resolve the mysteries of the heart.
There is profound wisdom and creativity in the core of not-knowing, in this sort of alchemical marination, but we must allow ourselves that confrontation with our embodied vulnerability.
In this, we see that not-knowing is a perfectly valid, honorable, and authentic place to be, and not in need of transformation. It is a pure expression of life, in and of itself, exactly as it is. Its value is not in its transcendence, but in its conscious embrace.
