A mantra for facing the unknown
Preparing for the Journey
How do you prepare for an experience you’ve never had before? A place you’ve never visited, a role you’ve never played, a responsibility you’ve never carried before? How to prepare for the unknown?
Many of us will read or study what others have said about it. We might memorize new words, ideas or understandings that could come in handy. We might practice new skills. And we might purchase supplies, clothing, equipment that could be needed. But what if the most important thing when experiencing the unknown is what we already carry within us?
I’m thinking about a bit of very solid advice I learned 34 years ago as a new mother. David and I were leaving the hospital with our first and only child, Cat, born less than 24 hours earlier. Wrapped tightly in a blanket and with a doll-sized, hand-knitted cap fitted snuggly on their head, Cat was sleeping soundly in an infant car seat that doubled as a carrier. It was dinner time and David and I had ordered a pizza that we picked up on the way home, so when we unloaded the car, we put both the hot pizza and the sleeping baby in the middle of the dining room table and then sat down to eat the pizza while admiring our new baby.
Cat was beautiful and peaceful, sleeping in the carrier as we ate. But mixed in our admiration were high levels of apprehension. How, we wondered out loud to each other, would we ever learn all we needed to know to take care of this new life resting firmly in our hands – and now sleeping on our dining room table? Sure, we were overjoyed and full of awe, but we were also overwhelmed by the task ahead.
Fortunately for us (and perhaps for Cat too), among the many parenting books we had been reading was an updated edition of a book my mom had valued when raising me – Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, first published in 1945. And there, in the first sentence of the first page of the first chapter, was the advice I memorized as a mantra that would carry me through so many days and nights of parenting quandries, challenges and worries.
“You know more than you think you do.”
“You know more than you think you do,” began the book of some 700 pages of expert advice. For while Dr. Benjamin Spock gave us plenty of scientifically tested and proven advice, it was significant to me – and I think to many other readers and parents too – that the first thing he wrote about, the first thing he underscored was not his own expertise but the expertise of the parent, which is to say the deep knowledge embedded in relationship and love.
“You know more than you think you do,” Spock told those of us anxiously wringing our hands. Not only that. He assured us that much of what we didn’t already know we would learn – not from experts but from our children themselves. And our willingness to learn from our children, he said, would help us to grow and mature too, reaching the next stage of our own development as adults.
Just as first-time parents might quake over their new responsibilities, any of us living on the threshold of change might be reasonably intimidated by the unfamiliarity of all that is being asked of us today. In addition to the upheaval in some of our personal lives, we are collectively facing tremendous uncertainties environmentally, politically, economically and technologically in the world we share. What if we prepared for the unpredictability of our times by recalling this mantra – that we know more than we think we do when we approach new experiences with love and an openness to relationship with others?
I would hope we will also consult with experts, with science, experience and reason. But when we begin by acknowledging the wisdom of love and relationship already carried within – and we open our attention to others living through change with us – we will be as well prepared as anyone can be for the unknown.
Our shared world is quaking with change and uncertainty. We’re living in a time of many possibilities, some unwanted and others of great promise. How might our participation in the unknowns of our day be informed by the wisdom of love and relationship carried within? How might this knowledge prepare us to better navigate and shape what lies ahead?
Karen