I was very sure of myself for a large part of my early life. I had an answer for everything. Then one day I happened to answer a question with the words “I don’t know.” A person I worked with everyday almost fell of of her chair. From that moment on, I began to discover bits of a vast unseen universe that lay just beyond. All that was required was that I take a step out from where I was to look around.
There is a saying that when one has an answer, there is no looking for anything else. Everything else remains undiscovered without any of the life enhancing benefits that may be possible.
We all are swimming in an ocean of instant information. We are all breathing, feeling, thinking, opinion factories. The information is brought effortlessly to our fingertips, many times to help us form a useful opinion of what might benefit our own personal world.
We all like belonging, so we find a body of like minded believers. Believing is also the single road to no longer finding anything else. Seeing the sun come up in the morning, it was well known for ages that the sun revolved around the earth, obviously. Looking at almost anything from the opposite side is revealing.
There is a forest out there waiting to be explored. It is the growing, evolving forest of our lives. Standing under the shade of one tree in one’s own front yard may be comfortable but eventually the thought is entrenched in stone that there is nothing that could be any better.
Much has been newly found, in the growing, changing natural world around us, and created in the mind of humanity. New thoughts bubble up to the surface like the crude oil discovered more than a century ago. What if we had not explored the usefulness of that raw material? We would not have the many useful objects we have like the multitude of things developed from that resource. These are benefits and side effects we could not have imagined.
This also leads me to appreciation for the water we must each have for life, renewed and cleansed for us by the vast ecosystem we walk around in. With all of these things swirling around us daily, we can look out beyond our front door, and find what might be useful in not knowing exactly how it all works. And we will discover and appreciate so much more.