It's Hard to Unknow
Some truths don't simply stay with us. They quietly become part of who we are.
Welcome to our first exploration.
Season IV ended with more questions than answers, and that seems exactly right.
Rather than rushing into another season, I’d like to wander for a while. We’ll follow interesting questions, unexpected conversations, and occasional detours.
Some explorations may begin with something I notice. Others may begin with something one of you shares. This one began with a reader’s comment that stayed with me long after I finished reading it.
She wrote about losing friends, facing health challenges of her own, and realizing that life no longer stretched endlessly into the future. Then she added a sentence I haven’t been able to shake.
“It’s hard to unknow all of that.”
I knew exactly what she meant.
There are moments in life that don’t simply teach us something. They change the landscape.
Once you’ve watched a parent grow frail, you never look at old age quite the same way.
Once you’ve sat beside someone taking their last breath, ordinary mornings become less ordinary.
Once you’ve held your first grandchild, the future becomes strangely personal.
Once you’ve discovered that someone quietly loves you, the world feels different.
There are truths that become part of us the moment we see them.
We begin living from them rather than just remembering them.
I wonder if wisdom is less about accumulating knowledge than about learning to live with the things we can no longer unknow.
As a younger man, I imagined wisdom meant finding answers.
Now I’m not so sure.
Perhaps it is carrying better questions.
What deserves my attention?
What truly matters?
How should I spend the time I have?
What do I owe the people I love?
Those questions don’t arrive because we’ve read another book.
They arrive because life quietly removes the illusion that we have forever.
Oddly enough, I don’t find that depressing.
I find it clarifying.
It helps explain why sunsets seem richer than they did when I was twenty.
Why conversations linger longer.
Why friendships matter more.
Why interruptions feel less inconvenient when someone simply needs to be heard.
The clock hasn’t necessarily begun moving faster.
I’ve simply started listening to it.
Perhaps that’s one of life’s hidden gifts.
Not the certainty that time is limited.
The invitation to notice what has always been precious.
There is no returning to the person we were before certain truths entered our lives.
And perhaps we shouldn’t want to.
The goal isn’t to recover our innocence.
The goal is to let our awareness deepen our gratitude rather than diminish our joy.
That reader was right.
It is hard to unknow all of that.
But maybe that is exactly how life teaches us to live more intentionally.
I’d love to know what truth has become impossible for you to unknow.
And how has it changed the way you live?
Thank you for responding to my comment with so much depth. I so very much appreciate your prolific posts, which speak to my soul. "It's hard to unknow" has been woven into my life tapestry for many years now. When my son died, the unspeakable pain felt like it changed the chemistry of my brain. But strangely, I did not shake my fist at God. I was moved to compassion for anyone experiencing horrific tragedies. I wanted to read about the Rwandan genocide, the holocasut, the Indonesian tsunami. How resilient spirits overcome suffering. Kindness became my mantra. That's the most profound way I could not "unknow" my experience. And it was what healed me.