On Inward Knowing and What Becomes Ours

One of the strangest things about being human is that life begins before we have any way of understanding it. Stranger still, before we stand a chance of understanding it, we are already feeling our way through it.

From the beginning, we are already living in ways we cannot yet fully comprehend. In this sense, we are up against a kind of not knowing that resists understanding.

And as life continues, so does our not knowing, especially in relation to what matters most to us. We do not automatically know what to trust, how to love in ways that are true to us, or how to live in ways that deepen the quality of our lives. This not knowing returns in more intimate forms as we try to trust our own experience, even while life keeps presenting other ways to live, and not all of them feel true to us.

Before we can begin shaping our lives more intentionally, much of our lives is spent trying to discover what matters most to us, what we can trust, and how we want to live. Even this takes time, because what matters to us does not always become clear all at once, and a life does not become more truly our own simply because we are living it. Part of the struggle is that long before we can reflect on our lives and begin making sense of them, life is already taking shape in us in ways we do not yet understand.

What makes this harder is that some parts of what we are living out cannot be made sense of on the surface of life alone, because from the outside we can often see what keeps recurring without knowing what lies beneath it. What keeps recurring in our lives may point to something important within us before we know how to think about it more clearly. Part of what is so strange is that life keeps returning us to what we do not yet know, and asking us to face it inwardly.

Life asks us to face it inwardly because what matters most in life does not remain only outside us. It enters into how we think, what we feel, and how we go about living our lives.

Life introduces us to a kind of not knowing that we may spend much of our lives trying to understand. Take the unsettling experience of feeling repulsed by a loved one and pulling away when they offer us the intimacy we have been longing for, while barely understanding why we are responding this way. Such moments can show how a kind of not knowing may already be active within us, shaping how we think and feel before we understand the psychological dynamics that lead us to respond in confusing ways.

Over time, they may open up larger questions about who we are, what matters to us, and why we can pull away from what we most long for. And because such questions do not yield easy answers, we may find ourselves struggling not only with uncertainty, but with ourselves as well.

But if we are not careful, we can spend our lives lost not only in what life asks of us, but also in the flood of answers around us that we do not know how to make sense of. We may not know what our lives are asking of us in the first place, let alone how to answer as well as we can.

This leaves us in a difficult and, at times, haunting position. We begin in families and social worlds that are already giving us their versions of a good life, and with them, ideas about what we should want, who we should become, and how we should find our place in the world. These answers do more than surround us. They enter through what others want from us, the kinds of attention they give us, and the ways they respond when we move toward or away from what they value. By the time we are able to question them, we may already be living by answers that are not truly our own.