"I Don't Know"

One of my favorite sayings is "the three best words in the English language just might be 'I don't know' ."

"I don't know" is the most teachable place to be in the whole world, and also the most honest. It's at the point where we are willing to give up the idea that we've got it all figured out that we begin to open to true understanding. This requires that we give up the illusion that we're in control. The biggie in this is that by saying "I don't know", we're then going to have to look at things about ourselves and our world that we have been trying for eons to avoid seeing.

We're also going to have to give up on the idea that we've got the answers, and that if we can force everybody to see it our way and do what we think they should do, we'll be safe and everyone will be happy. Point of fact, that's total BS, and it's an incredibly brutal way to interact with our fellow human beings.

Earlier tonight, I was reading an Amazon customer review of Elie Wiesel's book Night, a fictional narrative based on his experience as a childhood survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. The reviewer in question emphatically stated that the author had to be lying, because he wasn't "emotional" enough in the way he described what happened. The implication was that she knew what an appropriate response to such an experience would be, and Mr. Wiesel did not meet her criteria.

Pardon my French, but how the hell would she know?

If you haven't been through it, you have no idea how it feels, how it affects you physically or mentally, or how you would respond in similar circumstances. If you're sitting there on your comfy sofa, beverage in hand, and saying "Well, I know I'd do such-and-such", you're fooling yourself. You do not know. You have no way of knowing.

Now, I didn't go through something of the magnitude of the Holocaust, but having gone through Hurricane Katrina and the events afterward has confirmed for me the truth of that old saying, "don't judge a person until you've walked a mile in his shoes."

The amount of sheer ignorance and arrogance on the part of people who ought to have known better is still mind-boggling to me, and now that my mind is getting "unboggled" from the PTSD, I'm seeing it even more clearly. This includes people in my immediate experience after the hurricane -- family and friends -- as well as people posting on the Internet and writing op-eds and letters to the editor, sitting in the comfort of their homes and spewing their judgmentally self-righteous puke onto people who had just had their entire world wiped out.

"I don't know. I am willing to learn."

Then listen.

Then we can begin to communicate with each other, and maybe, just maybe, we can start working together to save this world of ours.

Comments

[michael]

Hello Kitty,

I have a favorite quote that I think happens to fit well here. It's from Shunryu Suzuki: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few."

[Kitty]

:)

[marlaine]

i think, too...that perhaps even if you do go through the same ordeal...you may experience feelings different than others just because you function/are wired differently than they are
how can we ever judge anyone else...we don't know what they've been through...ever

[Kitty]

That puts this whole business of "judging" in a clear light ... how useless it really is.