How What You Don’t Know Can Help You
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Growing up, on the second Sunday in May, you could usually find my family outside, planting flowers for my mom. On Mother’s Day last year, my husband, kids, and I stuffed our in-ground planters with seedlings: basil, mint, strawberries, and tiny tomatoes you can pop in your mouth come August. But when May rolled around this year, with the tulips still tucked under the earth, I wondered whether it would be safe to plant? How would I know?
I polled the parents at pick up. “After the final frost,” they said. But with an April that felt like a February, who knew when that would be?
The internet certainly didn’t. Official-looking sources confidently declared both April 20 and May 21 the last frost date in my part of Minnesota.
Then, with sudden, simultaneous certainty, the trees — whom I hadn’t thought to ask — announced that they knew. With chartreuse tips, they proclaimed: It’s time.
Not so long ago, this kind of thing would have made me itchy. If only I had framed the question more clearly. If only I had found the right sources. I could have prepared better. But honestly? So what?
Not knowing is glorious! How amazing it was that day when I first caught a flash of green out my window, then peered out to see the hue echoed on tree after tree after tree all the way down my street — a riot of color in a world that had been black and white for so long.
The ways of knowing that I’ve relied upon thus far — research, science, the sorts of answers one human can tell another — have their limits. The world is filled with magic. Unraveling its mystery is compelling, but so too is receiving it wholesale.
Pulling at strings, looking behind the curtain — these are all efforts to resolve uncertainty, that deeply uncomfortable state we humans so desperately aim to avoid. But what if, instead of mindlessly scrambling to conquer the frontiers of our knowledge, we occasionally practiced resting in our imperfect understanding. What if we made room for awe?
The American Psychological Association defines awe as:
The experience of admiration and elevation in response to physical beauty, displays of exceptional ability, or moral goodness. The awe-inspiring stimulus is experienced as ‘vast’ and difficult to comprehend.
Awe is connected to all kinds of good things. Susan K. Chen and Myriam Mongrain of the York University Department of Psychology articulate some of these benefits in their 2020 article in The Journal of Positive Psychology:
awe may promote prosocial instincts through the recognition of one’s place in a vast interconnected world and be particularly beneficial in this age of rapid technological progress and social unrest.”
For me, awe inspires humility and acceptance. Cultivating awe helps me clap back to our “always be optimizing” culture.
I’m not saying you should ditch science. I certainly don’t plan to stop trying to figure things out. I hope I always stay curious. But as I get older, I find I’d rather greet the edges of my understanding with the expansiveness of awe, not the smallness of angst.
After the great unfurling, I drove to Home Depot. Green leaves and black humus perfumed our white minivan on the ride back. Mother’s Day had come and gone. As I zipped home across the just-woken-up land, I smiled, marveling at what a calendar can miss.
New From Me This Month
For this month’s newsletter, I started writing about how not knowing when to plant inspired delight (and awe). Then I checked the word count and decided 547 words might be more at home on Medium than in your inbox. If you have three minutes and would like an invitation to connect with the awe embedded in your intellectual limits, click to read How What You Don’t Know Can Help You. (Update 1/21/24: I’ve decided you can handle the word count and I don’t want to leave this on Medium-only, so have included the full text above)
The spring edition of the Macalester today has a sweet story called Ten Years of MacReads, which highlights the bookclub I founded and run for Twin Cities Macalester alumni. The piece is packed with great quotes from MacReaders, including this one from Kate Baxter-Kauf ’02, who said “MacReads is absolutely the best of why I went to Macalester and why I love Macalester people. It’s smart people in a room discussing something in-depth and with feeling, knowledgeable about the subject, and excited to dig in together.” If you’re reading this and you went to Macalester, I think you might love MacReads too. Hit me up for details!
Your Curated Reading List
Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence, takes place in Minneapolis between November 2019 and November 2020. Having lived there then myself, I was reluctant to revisit that period while reading for pleasure. But I’m glad I did. there’s something beautiful and useful about metabolizing difficult times through art and Erdrich’s famous mish-mash of styles (Is this book fantasy? Creative non-fiction? Paranormal fiction?) is particularly suited to making meaning of such a complex, chaotic time.
In my former life as a PTSD researcher and psychology student, I understood that on the line between science and pseudoscience, polyvagal theory is just north of quackery. But in my writing life, like when I interviewed Mona Delahooke for this article for Romper, the theory keeps bubbling up. So I decided to read Deb Dana’s book Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory. While polyvagal theory is still shaky science, it’s also (at least for me) a serviceable story to make sense of sensations and feelings and navigate them more skillfully. Sometimes that’s a better bar.
My adult life has been filled with transitions — marriage, kids, jobs, houses, the whole shebang. For a while, I kept wondering when these changes would slow down, so I could get back to the business of living. But lately I’ve started to understand that rolling with these changes IS the business of living. What I’m saying is Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age by Bruce Feiler grabbed me from the title. I found a lot to like inside too, particularly the way it normalizes change and introduces the concept of an oscillating life story.
Something Delightful
I love oak trees. They’re so big and beautiful and the way their branches reach to the heavens has long had my heart. But I only recently learned that oaks are remarkable from a scientific perspective, too.
I was paging through a book at a neighborhood shop and came upon some fantastic facts that inspired me to go digging deeper once I got home. What I found delighted me, and I thought it might delight you, too. For instance, James Godfrey-Faussett writes for One Earth about the remarkable biodiversity of oaks:
Up to 2300 species are known to be associated with oak, and that doesn’t include all of the fungi, or any of the bacteria and other microorganisms which create a symbiotic home with the oak.
The 2300 species consist of some 38 bird species, 229 bryophytes, 108 fungi, 1178 invertebrates, 716 lichens, and 31 mammals. Of these species, 320 are found only on oak trees, and a further 229 species are rarely found on species other than oak.
Let’s Connect!
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