When I was young(er), I knew everything. We all did, right?
I knew what I wanted, what people should do, and what people should say. I knew how businesses should be run, relationships should work, and problems should be solved. I had opinions, people...and I was beyond confident in them.
Then I grew up(ish) and learned more. Unexpectedly, somewhere along the way I became considerably less certain about pretty much everything. Ever notice the more you learn, the more you realize how little you actually know?
At first, this seems completely backwards. Shouldn't decades of experience make us more certain? We've made mistakes, survived some shit, build careers, raised families, lost people, loved, changed directions, and accumulated all kinds of evidence about how life works. Surely, we should have this figured out by now.
Except...No.
All those years and all those experiences taught me how much I don't know.
I've learned there are usually about seventeen sides to a story I originally thought had two. I've learned smart people can look at exactly the same information and reach completely different conclusions. I've learned something can be absolutely right for one person and completely wrong for another.
Maybe most importantly, I've learned I can change my mind. It feels like the simple act of changing your mind gets a bad rap. We are supposed to pick a lane. We are supposed to know what we believe, and we are supposed to consistently stick to our guns. But why?
If I know more today than I knew five years ago, shouldn't some of my opinions change? If I've met more people, experienced more things, screwed up a few times and discovered some of my brilliant ideas were, in fact, not particularly brilliant, I'd certainly hope my thinking has evolved.
Have you ever thought maybe "wisdom" isn't knowing more, but rather becoming comfortable saying, "I don't know."?
I don't know what someone else's life should look like. I don't know what decision is right for them. Hell, sometimes I don't know what is right for me.
Instead of finding that terrifying, as I once did, I am starting to find it incredibly freeing. When you stop needing to know everything, you get curious again. You ask questions instead of waiting for your turn to talk. You listen to people with differing opinions. You leave a little room for the possibility you might be wrong.
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You try things, change course, learn something new, and allow it to mess with something you thought you already knew. I think this is especially important as we get older. At this point, it would be really easy to decide we've seen enough. We know enough. We know who we are, how the world works, and what everybody else is doing wrong.
I don't want to become more certain as I get older. I want to become more curious. I want to keep meeting people who challenge the way I think. I want to read things I don't agree with. I want to try things I'm terrible at and give myself the opportunity to get better. I want to ask stupid questions. I want to discover something at 70 that makes me laugh at something I was completely convinced of at 30.
I WANT TO KEEP GROWING.
Perhaps that's the lesson we find in watching a tiny sapling become a mighty oak. Continuous growth gives us deeper roots, a broader perspective, and enough experience to understand how much we still have to learn.
Maybe the problem isn't that we don't know everything, but that we think we do.
