I don't know

and that's comforting

For the past few weeks my daughter has been waking up 2-3 hours earlier than usual. It’s thrown everything off, causing the delicate wires that keep our days together to jut out at odd angles. It’s also meant that, suddenly, I need to go to bed 2-3 hours earlier too. As someone who has dipped in and out of insomnia her whole life, this is no small feat.

The other night, though, I finally did it. I had shut down all the devices, taken enough grounding downtime, did the yoga, the meditation, the breathwork, and fell fast asleep by 11:00.

Then I woke up at 3:00 am.

At first it wasn’t so bad, I’m used to waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom or touch a particularly poignant dream. But as I laid on one side, and then the other, the worry started to creep in. What if I can’t go back to sleep? What if that’s all the sleep I get tonight? What if I’m still awake when she wakes up?

I’ve been on this escalator before. The heat rash of worry rising like hives until your whole body feels itchy with the sheer anxiety of no sleep, no sleep, no sleep.

And so, of course, it happened. I was still awake when she woke up.

I spent the day feeling like the bottom of a gravel pit, torn up from not only lack of sleep, but the long hours of anxiety that marked my nighttime. That evening, I collapsed gratefully into bed, but then it happened again. I woke up in the middle of the night.

I told myself I just needed to empty my bladder, but when I got back into bed I could feel the anxiety begin to creep up again. The heat rash of worry licking at my sides. Will I be awake again when she wakes up? Will she get up extra early once more? Is this just how thing are going to be now?

Then, something completely unexpected happened—I heard a voice.

It was different than the voice that had been muttering inside my head before. This voice was calm, neutral, at ease…amused. And the voice just said one little thing— “I don’t know”

I sat with that for a second, my circling inner monologue ceasing suddenly.

I don’t know, the voice said happily, as if it were the only answer I needed.

And I realized in a wave that it was true… I didn’t know.

I didn’t know if this would be another sleepless night. I didn’t know if this is the new pattern or just a few weeks detour. I didn’t know what, actually, was going to happen.

It felt like a cool washcloth of chickweed draped over the heat of my whole worried body.

The deep balm of not-knowing spread in even further directions, to the things I didn’t even realize I had been worrying about.

I don’t know if we’ll get her into that daycare, or if that’s even a good thing. I don’t know if the trip I’m planning will work out. I don’t know when we’ll wean. I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t know if I’m doing motherhood right.

I actually don’t know, and that’s comforting.

We don’t realize that so much of our anxiety comes from thinking we know.

Even when it seems we’re anxious about not-knowing, what actually causes us to loop is the fear of what we think we already know…and are anticipating.

This will be hard. This will hurt. This will change everything.

We try to protect ourselves from the vastness of the unknown by anticipating the worst, meanwhile what we’re actually doing is supplanting the liberation of not-knowing with the limitation of certainty.

It’s a relief to remember that you don’t know. That no one, actually, does.

In life, all of us are blissfully oblivious, it’s just that sometimes we forget that obliviousness can be bliss.

I’m sometimes quite attached to knowing. I like research and nerding out on books and finding the perfect word to describe something. There’s a thrill to having just the right answer at the right time. It can be comfy to know…until it’s not.

Because there’s so much more to this world than we can ever know—And that’s a blessing.

When we slip into the sanctuary of not-knowing we can relax. We can shrug off some of the responsibility we think we need to hold. We can let go.

When I embrace that I truly don’t know, it feels like stepping into a field of every kind of wildflower. I don’t need to know their names to know that there are so many possibilities here, to feel the unnameable joy of being alive.

Stepping into not-knowing is like being a child again in the benevolence of the universe, the playground that is mystery.

So this has been my practice all week. The moment I feel anxiety start to creep up, I imagine myself plopping down on a tuft of grass in the universe of that meadow, opening my arms wide and proclaiming with delight “I don’t know!!!”

I remind myself before I go to sleep “I don’t know!” and it feels like pulling a weighted blanket over my body. And I tell myself the same thing again when my daughter and I are up once more in the wee hours of the morning.

Will it work forever, this new life-giving perspective, this way of releasing anxiety in a flash? Will it stop being effective when the stress digs too deep or the water level gets too high…

I don’t know!

And isn’t that wonderful?