If there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that I don’t know anything.

Sometimes that looks or feels like a failing. I should know something by now, right? My compass should at least have found one north star to point toward. Some measure of “truth” should be rising to the surface after simmering for this long. What have I been doing for the past forty years if not figuring out at least something?

As a parent, it feels even more imperative. Almost irresponsible not to know. How can I lead little people through a world of chaos without knowing something… anything? Perhaps the day to day growth will take care of itself in curious, growing children if I simply stay out of the way. But what about when it’s more complex? What happens when decisions have to be made. Decisions about treatment. Decisions about how to proceed when there is no playbook. Decisions about perspective…what is the story we will tell ourselves about this.

How can I possibly do this without knowing how?

I don’t know.

This morning I went for a walk through the neighborhood that I have lived in for a decade, down a street I have driven daily for over ten years. Yet today, different from all the days before, I suddenly noticed that one of the houses had a weather vane that looks like a running fox. Such a small thing. And yet, a weather vane is fairly uncommon to my knowledge, and a fox one at that. It’s the first one like that I’ve ever seen.

I drove past it for ten years and never saw it. Even though it was right there in front of me. But today I did. And now I see it every time.

I think that is the way it is with the whole world. It’s right in front of my face and yet I don’t see it. I see and experience such a tiny fraction of what is around me. There is infinitely more I am NOT aware of than what I am.

I know nothing.

And though the impulse to believe I am in control of something will lead me to criticize the acceptance of this, to fight against it and insist otherwise… there’s just too much evidence to the contrary.

As disorienting and humbling as it is, it is weirdly comforting. I walk through sleeping winter garden on a February afternoon and it looks like everything is dead or dormant. But if I zoom in to a small patch of wet earth I find it is alive with details. Seeds dropped from a fall harvest, waiting. A small green garlic shoot. A spider, awake in the sunshine. Roots. Decay. Growth. A whole little world exists in this tiny six inch square. I walk over thousands of these tiny worlds every day without noticing them. More of them exist in the branches and leaves above my head, and more still in the Spring highways criss crossing the big Nebraska sky.

There’s no way for me to see it all. I walk through an antique store and can’t even absorb all the items that I see in front of me on a shelf, let alone everything that is happening around me on a micro and macro scale. I order a prehistoric shark tooth on the internet and when it arrives I hold it in my hand, run my fingers over the tiny ridges. I wonder what they have seen. I think maybe I can feel the density of time in the weight of it. I set it on my shelf next to a piece of ocean jasper that looks a little bit like what rhabdomyosarcoma cells look like under a microscope. I wonder if there’s a connection. Probably. Isn’t there always?

In the face of such enormity, such complexity, such fluidity, knowing anything for sure is impossible. We aren’t meant to know anything.

And so I don’t.