I Don’t Have the Answers

I don’t have the answers.

There was a time when admitting that would have made me incredibly uncomfortable.

I thought I was supposed to know.

Know what I was doing.
Know where I was going.
Know the random fact someone asked me in the middle of a conversation.

And if I didn’t?

Well…

Surely I should at least look like I knew.

Which is kind of funny when I think about it now, because none of us start out that way.

We Start With Questions

Think about kids.

They ask everything.

Why is the sky blue?

Where does the moon go during the day?

Why do birds fly?

Why can’t I have ice cream for breakfast?

Okay, that last one is actually a pretty valid question. 😂

Kids aren’t embarrassed by what they don’t know.

They’re fascinated by it.

Not knowing means there is something new to discover.

And somewhere along the way, many of us learn to stop asking.

Maybe someone laughed at a question.

Maybe a teacher made us feel like we should already know the answer.

Maybe we were corrected one too many times.

Maybe we simply picked up the message that smart people know things, so if we wanted to be seen as intelligent, capable, successful, or worthy of being in the room, we needed to have the answer.

Curiosity slowly gets replaced by certainty.

Or at least the appearance of certainty.

And the wild part for me is that I spent years working with children.

I loved teaching them.

I loved their questions. I loved watching their faces when something finally clicked. I loved encouraging them to explore, try something, get it wrong, ask another question and try again.

I wanted them to know that learning wasn’t about already having the answer.

It was about discovering it.

I understood how important that space was for them.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that I wasn’t giving myself the same space.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, I had created completely different rules.

For them:

Ask. Explore. Wonder. Try.

For me:

You should probably already know this.

I didn’t recognize the contradiction then.

I do now.

Then Something Small Started to Change

I remember spending time with someone who would ask me the most random questions.

“What’s the population of the area you grew up in?”

Ummm…

Pause.

I don’t know.

“Well, what do you think it is?”

So I’d guess.

Then we’d Google it.

And let me tell you, sometimes I was off by a few thousand. 😂

But nothing happened.

The world didn’t stop spinning.

Nobody looked at me like I was stupid.

There wasn’t some invisible scoreboard keeping track of how many things I knew versus how many things I didn’t.

We’d laugh about how wildly wrong one of us was, learn the answer, and move right along to the next conversation.

It was such a small thing.

At the time, I didn’t realize it was teaching me something much bigger.

Maybe I was learning how to be curious again.

Not Knowing Isn’t the Same as Not Being Intelligent

Somewhere in life, I think a lot of us learn to associate knowing with intelligence.

We want to have the answer.

We want to sound confident.

We want to contribute something valuable to the conversation.

And maybe underneath all of that, we don’t want someone else to discover that there are things we simply don’t know.

But of course there are.

There are so many things I don’t know.

Thank goodness.

How boring would life be if there were nothing left to discover?

These days, I actually enjoy saying:

“I don’t know.”

Sometimes I genuinely don’t.

Sometimes I have an idea.

And sometimes I might even know the answer but still leave a little space before offering it because I want to know what someone else thinks.

Because I’ve learned that knowing something and being curious about it can exist at the same time.

Maybe you know the facts.

But you don’t know someone else’s experience.

Maybe you know how you would handle something.

But you don’t know how someone else would.

Maybe you already have an answer.

But theirs might make you look at the entire question differently.

And I love that.

There Is Freedom in Curiosity

I spent a lot of my life trying to understand things.

People.

Relationships.

Choices.

Myself.

Why something happened.

What it meant.

What was coming next.

What I was supposed to do with all of it.

I wanted answers because answers felt safe.

An answer puts a period at the end of the sentence.

But lately, I’ve started appreciating the question mark.

The question mark leaves room.

Room to learn.

Room to change.

Room for another person to sit across from you and tell you something you never would have thought of yourself.

Room to discover that maybe the way you have always seen something isn’t the only way to see it.

There is something incredibly freeing about realizing that you don’t have to walk into every room knowing everything.

You can simply walk in curious.

Maybe the goal was never to become the adult who finally has all the answers.

Maybe it was to become the adult who isn’t afraid to ask questions.

Maybe “I Don’t Know” Is an Invitation

Now when someone tells me something I don’t understand, I don’t feel the same need to pretend.

Tell me more.

How does that work?

Why do you think that?

What made you see it that way?

And suddenly, “I don’t know” doesn’t feel like the end of the conversation.

It feels like the beginning of one.

Maybe that’s one of the quiet gifts of getting older.

Or healing.

Or growing.

Or simply becoming more comfortable inside your own skin.

You stop needing to prove that you belong in the conversation.

You realize you already do.

You can be intelligent and still ask questions.

You can be confident and still change your mind.

You can teach and still have things to learn.

You can have lived an entire lifetime and still discover something completely new on a random Tuesday afternoon.

You can even Google the population of your hometown and discover that your guess was hilariously wrong.

And you know what?

You’re still you.

Maybe even a slightly wiser version than you were five minutes ago.

Or maybe just a little more like the curious kid you used to be.

I Still Don’t Have the Answers

I don’t know exactly what the next few years of my life will look like.

I don’t know who I’ll meet.

I don’t know which experiences will change me.

I don’t know which things I believe today will look completely different to me someday.

And strangely enough, that doesn’t scare me the way it once did.

There is a whole world of things I haven’t learned yet.

People I haven’t listened to yet.

Perspectives I haven’t considered yet.

Questions I haven’t even thought to ask yet.

That feels less like uncertainty now.

It feels like possibility.

Maybe growing up isn’t supposed to mean leaving our curiosity behind.

Maybe part of becoming ourselves is finding our way back to it.

So no, I don’t have all the answers.

I don’t really want them anymore.

I’d rather keep a few question marks.

They leave more room for learning, connection, wonder…

and whatever beautiful thing I haven’t discovered yet.

With sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies,
Skye Mari 🦋🌈☀️