A TERRIBLE-BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURE
The Unknown
Learning to Trust What I Could Not Know
“That’s when I could relax into the unknown. It was like floating down a river blind. My senses tuned to different sounds altogether. The rhythm of my healing became a wonder—a terrible-beautiful adventure.”
— Twice Widowed
I Couldn't Do This at First
I couldn't have written those words at the beginning. After Darrell died, the unknown wasn't interesting to me. It was frightening. I had already learned something about life I could never unlearn: terrible things really do happen. The unimaginable can become real.
And there was very little room in my life to contemplate uncertainty anyway. I had to move. I had to get my father into a nursing home. I had work to do, and if I didn't do it, the nonprofit I was running could lose its funding. My life required decisions from me at a time when making decisions was extraordinarily hard.
Some things had to be answered. But so many others couldn't be. Would I be all right? Who was I without him? What would happen to the work we had shared? Would I always feel this way? What would my life become?
I wanted answers because answers felt safer than not knowing. And there weren't any.
Trusting What I Couldn't Know
Eventually, I began to recognize a difference between what I needed to decide and what I desperately wanted to know. There were decisions in front of me that belonged to today. Where would I live? What needed my attention? What could wait? What couldn't?
But no amount of thinking could tell me who I would become or what my life would look like years from now. I couldn't know what I would want, what I would discover, whom I would meet, what would interest me, what would frighten me, or what might become important to me. The future remained stubbornly unavailable.
That was difficult for me because I wanted to trust what I could understand. I wanted enough information to make a good decision, enough evidence to know where something might lead. The unknown offered none of that. And after loss, why would I trust it? The unknown had already delivered things I would never have chosen.
Trusting the unknown did not mean deciding it was safe. It meant something much smaller and harder for me: becoming willing, sometimes, to enter an experience without knowing what it would do to me.
Choosing an Experience
That made some of my choices more deliberate. A new place. A conversation. Something creative. An experience outside the familiar. Sometimes I chose simply to see what would happen.
I wasn't choosing a better future. I had no way to know whether an experience would be wonderful, disappointing, painful, ridiculous, or completely unimportant. I was choosing the experience despite myself.
I didn't have to know where something would lead before I allowed myself to encounter it. I didn't have to turn interest into a plan or curiosity into a new identity. An experience could simply give me something I didn't have before: more information about myself and about this unfamiliar world I was living in.
Sometimes I discovered something I liked. Sometimes I didn't. Sometimes an experience surprised me. Sometimes it hurt. Sometimes it felt unsafe.
Floating Blind
That's the river I was writing about.
For so long, I had been trying to get around the bend before I arrived there. I could imagine what might be waiting and begin living inside that imagined future as though it were already here. My imagination learned to be good at finding the catastrophe.
Floating blind meant something different. I still couldn't see around the bend, but I was beginning to trust that I didn't need to see it before I got there.
I didn't have to live what hadn't happened yet.
When I wasn't so busy trying to protect myself from a future I couldn't see, my attention sometimes returned to the life that was actually around me. That's what I meant when I wrote, “My senses tuned to different sounds altogether.”
There was still sorrow. There was still uncertainty. There were still things I desperately wished were different. But there was also attention, curiosity, and surprise. I don't know had once sounded almost entirely like danger.
Sometimes now it sounded like: I wonder.
Not I wonder as a prettier way of saying everything would be fine. I genuinely didn't know.
A Terrible-Beautiful Adventure
This is where the title of this companion began for me.
I wasn't discovering that the terrible was secretly beautiful. I wasn't learning that suffering had happened for a reason. And the river wasn't carrying me toward some promised destination.
The terrible remained terrible. But it wasn't the only thing I encountered.
Beauty could appear beside it. Curiosity could appear beside it. Something unexpected could reach me in a life I had not chosen and could not predict. I didn't have to make one reality less true to make room for another.
The same unknown that contained what I feared also contained what I could not yet imagine. I couldn't know in advance which I would encounter.
Trusting the unknown wasn't trusting that something good would happen. It was becoming willing to let the future remain unknown long enough for me to actually arrive there.
What Needs an Answer?
There are unknowns that require something from us. A decision has to be made. A bill has to be paid. Someone needs an answer. Life does not always give us the luxury of waiting.
And then there are questions we cannot answer from where we are standing. Sometimes simply recognizing the difference helped me.
Does this need an answer from me now?
Or is this something I cannot know yet?
I still wanted answers. I still feared things I could not control. Trusting the unknown never meant pretending otherwise.
But I was beginning to break the habit of living inside catastrophes that had not happened. Sometimes I could choose an experience and let it become whatever it would become.
And sometimes I encountered something I could never have imagined from where I had been standing.