A Way Without Answers

“Understanding means throwing away your knowledge.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

On Mondays, I meet with people who have cancer. .

Each Monday is different, which is also true of the people I encounter. The type of cancer they have, how long they’d had it, their ways of coping and feeling. I never know what I’m going to say. What do you say to someone in this situation, especially when you’re meeting them for the first time? What words can possibly fill that space? Making my way up the elevator, weaving through the halls towards the treatment center, I always feel a bit exposed, completely on the spot.

I suppose I’m not afraid of saying something wrong, or fearful of the conversation in general. It’s not an urge to say something that special, that can solve problems. It’s just the feeling of not knowing what to say at all. There’s no pressure, and there isn’t security, either. As I knock and poke my head around the curtain, I sometimes have a sense of there being an ocean between my breath and the first words to leave my mouth.

The other week, I met a young woman, not much older than I. It was her first round of chemotherapy, after being diagnosed a few weeks earlier. Day 1. She was by herself, sitting silently at the edge of the doorway. As I stepped in, my heart was in my throat. I had never met someone this early in their treatment before, and couldn’t imagine the feelings involved.

What happens when we don’t know what to do? What emerges when we cannot explain what we are witnessing?

These are the questions that were in my mind, and in hers as well. She told me about her life, how she had always tried to do right by others. She has ambitions and a sense of path, to live well and offer her talents to the world around her. The picture that she painted shimmered with light, with aspiration, and hope.

And then, a moment of pause. A stillness. Her lips trembled, her voice wavering. “I just…I just don’t know why”, she said. “I don’t understand why this is happening to me.”

Searching within myself, I found only space. No words came to me, no ideas, no impulse of knowing what to do. I realized that I didn’t know either, and my heart ached with that not-knowing. This woman’s question of ‘why’ expressed something that went beyond the both of us, or anything that we could do about it. Sitting with this for a moment, I decided that’s what I needed to say.

“I don’t understand either”, I said. “I don’t know, and here we are.”

What happens when we don’t know what to do? What emerges when we cannot explain what we are witnessing?

Life, in its turmoil and confusion, can seem desperate for answers. When there are many things that can confuse, challenge, and hurt us, there has to be a reason, a purpose for all of it. We want to know how, or why, or to what end bad things exist. Falling through life, an answer can feel like steady ground, something to stand on.

Often in my work, people come looking to me for answers: why they are ill, and why now, and for what reasons. Some of these reasons are personal: it’s their fault, they didn’t pay attention, they didn’t care when it was important to. Other reasons blame people, blame nature, the universe. The unfairness and grief of losing an expected life is often a painful journey.

I never have answers, at least not the ones people are looking for. There are many things that happen which I can’t explain, and many more that don’t. The temptation to reach for answers, however far-fetched and untrue, can be overwhelming.

Especially inviting is to offer something which I never say: “It’s going to be okay.” I don’t say this because it’s not the truth which lives in my heart. That truth doesn’t know whether it will be okay or not. To speak in either direction would be false, and a disservice to the person whom I’m working with. I’m not there to spin false optimism or empty platitudes: I’m there with them to meet reality, hand in hand.

What happens when we don’t know what to do? Quite a bit, if we’re willing. I don’t think you need to know what to do, to do something. Movement is still possible, but how we move becomes much different. How we listen to what can happen requires a different way of paying attention.

Not-knowing can be a teacher and a source of real wisdom. This is different from ignorance, which is asleep to reality and unaware of what’s happening. Not-knowing is a relationship with life in its natural expression, an embrace of mystery. It loosens the need to be right and assured all of the time, leaning into the possibility of a broadened perspective.

When I’m working with people with cancer, my experience of not-knowing allows something essential to happen: honesty. If honesty represents a healthy relationship with life, then not-knowing allows me to lean into the truth of my experience. I can share with people from a place of genuine inquiry, using my lack of answers to seek better questions.

If I pretended to have answers, I wouldn’t listen for questions in the first place. When honesty is available, I can empathize and connect to people from the ground of their reality. That ground is present to what’s in the room: people are often scared, and worried about what’s going to happen, grieving things seen and unseen. There’s no need to pretend otherwise, and that lack of pretending can be deeply liberating. The truth will set you free, as it were.

This freedom can walk closely with mourning. Especially when things are hard, having permission to be honest about what pains us and our lack of answers is both generative and saddening. At the heart of it is the yearning for things to be different, and they’re not. To wish it weren’t this way, and it is. That knowledge is a shrine in some way, a place that benefits from an offering. Its presence is solemn, but a step on the road to inner peace.

Even when I don’t know what to do, and I don’t have answers, I can still do something. In my work, I often find that the strength of a moment is not found in having an answer, but in how I meet reality with that other person. Companionship, kindness, compassion, and presence are the means by which we receive their lives. We are not out to solve something as much as get to know it better, to become better friends with thing as they are. After a while, answers are not so important as being curious about what’s possible.

To live with not-knowing is not a retreat from life. It’s also not a decision to stay in a kind of no-mans-land and refuse from joining in. We all have our values, and it is our responsibility to live them out as best we can. When we feel moved to do something, we should do it, and life’s complexity is not an opportunity to excuse ourselves from showing up. To be unsure is a doorway for each of us to step through.

None of this is explored with the suggestion that answers don’t exist. The confidence of our experience and what we wordlessly know to be true to ourselves is like a river, at once reliable and always changing. This kind of confidence is not threatened by transformation or the possibility of being wrong. Novelty and difference are not things to be afraid of. Instead, they are opportunities to know more deeply, to grow even closer to life itself.

The ‘answers’ in my life are things like understanding, patience, and generosity. They don’t require me to know everything, they just ask me to listen, and pay attention, and allow myself to be changed by what I hear. Even when things are uncertain, there’s a chance for me to draw close and connect with something.

To embrace not-knowing requires courage, and a willingness to be changed. It’s a perpetual experience of being without pressure and without security, completely open and interested in life. As we become more comfortable with curiosity, the more we begin to see ourselves. After all, who are we without wonder, without mystery? There is no human without questions, and it is in better questions that we begin to discover more of what might be out there for us. Sometimes these questions are difficult and challenging to face, but their capacity to harm is lessened by our own interest. The more light we offer with our attention, the less threatening their shadows become.

I worry about a life that is constantly sure of itself, capable of claiming everything as familiar. I worry about a life that can’t ask questions that are in search of relationship. I wonder about the security of answers that feel easy to reach, that require nothing of our interest and our senses.

Things are never static. To work with not-knowing is to join in life’s great unfolding, an experience of unraveling and weaving which, with our willingness, serves to strengthen all of our relationships. Not-knowing works gently with these threads, forever in the act of moving in space, putting something together. What we create is not dependent on certainty, a fixed and foreseeable thing. It is the blessing of creativity in its mystery, its amazement, its awe.