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Holding fast to the belief that the happenings of our lives are knowable can get us into deep trouble. This is as much the case for how you're going to spend the next hour, day, week or your entire lifetime as it is for believing that what will happen in politics and world events is knowable by the experts—something we are bombarded with each and every day.
Ironically, the belief that knowing what will happen prepares us for it actually leaves us less prepared for it. We can be unprepared, both materially and emotionally, if things seem to take a sudden turn because we “thought we knew for sure” how they’d go. Accepting—better yet, embracing—unknowability helps us be more, not less, prepared. More prepared to participate in what’s transpiring and give some direction to it. More prepared to create with others what will emerge from the process. More prepared to improvise. More prepared to grow.
Embracing unknowability is a way to live a “yes, and…” life. What I mean by that is accepting what is happening and trying to create and build with it, trying to make something of it. “Yes, and” is what professional improvisers do to create scenes for an audience. It’s also a valuable life skill, especially in uncertain times and when we’re in crisis. It can not only lower the negative temperature of your conversations with others, but also of the “talks” we have with ourselves, the things we say to ourselves that only increase our anxiety. It can help us see offers in some pretty grim situations. One of the greats of the musical improv world, Stephen Nachmanovitch, writes articulately about the value and joy of an improvisational life. Here, he focuses on some of the grimly unknowable we can build with:
"Pieces of art can be built; incredible things can be built from conflict. They can be built on uncertainty; they can be built on fear. That’s the great thing about this kind of work, it doesn’t have to be nice; it doesn’t have to be known. But if you are using your capacity to listen and if you are using the innate structuring ability that’s built into you as a 4. 5 billion-year-old living organism, then you can use fear, conflict, difficulty, unknow-ability as the basis for doing incredible things…"* (From a keynote address to the International Society for Improvised Music in 2006.)
With the word "unknow-ability" Nachmanovitch is pointing out a very ordinary quality of our lives that we overlook to our disadvantage. He is highlighting what cannot be known rather than what is not yet known. Things happen in our lives that are not knowable. As a simple example, you might have plans for the next five hours, but what you wind up doing is unknowable. If you do what you planned, you’ll think that’s because it was knowable. If you don’t, what will you think? Probably that something got in the way and the plans changed. You might have a negative reaction, or you might go with the flow. But either way, it probably won’t occur to you to consider that what was going to happen was not knowable until it happened. I invite you to try on "unknowing" in little ways and see how it fits.
You can read more about improvisation, unknowability and anxiety in The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world. Available at Amazon.
