The Edge of Knowing

a reflection for those arriving

Photo © Benjamin James Freeman

I wrote this reflection as a companion for those who find themselves in an unfamiliar season of becoming. A time when perhaps the maps you’ve kept close and have been using to now, have faded and become all but illegible, the familiar no longer fits with any degree of comfort and the next step is wrapped in a deafening silence. It’s not intended as a teaching, but a subtle hand on the shoulder, ushering you toward remembering. A remembering that to ‘not know’ is not to be lost, but to be deeply and beautifully alive.

I hope these words meet you gently. I hope they go some way to affirming what is already stirring inside of you. And may they remind you that your many questions are not a weakness, but a compass that points not outward, but inward, toward the vastness you carry within.

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The Edge of Knowing

There comes a time in every true, curious and lived life, when the many questions you have accumulated over the years grow heavier than the any of the answers you have managed to find. The world’s explanations, tidy, clever and complete as they may pretend to be, begin to feel like clothes that no longer fit the shape of what you distantly remember as you. You sense it, not as a sudden epiphany, but as a slow, haunting disquiet, a nagging unrest that stirs just beneath the surface of your days, picking at your skin. You can no longer ignore the quiet yet persistent ache in your chest that says: “there must be more than this.”

And so you arrive, perhaps uncertain (definitely uncertain), perhaps afraid (definitely afraid), at the shimmering edge of what you thought you knew so well, leaning over the edge of a precipice that compels you forward. You may have expected it to feel like arrival. Like an event to eclipse all events, but instead, it feels like undoing. A collapse. The maps you trusted curl in on themselves. They begin to tear at the careful creases you made throughout your journey and the signs and landmarks you previously relied upon grow illegible and useless. The maps, they crumble in your hand, the remnants rising like burning embers into the dark of night. You find yourself in a vast, beautiful silence. The only thing louder than the stillness is your own heartbeat.

But this…this is where the real journey begins: The Heart of Stillness.

The world doesn’t teach you how to consider this this path. Let alone walk it. Mostly, it teaches us how to build: careers, identities, arguments, opinions, platforms. It teaches us how to climb never ending ladders of never ending height and measure worth by a speed and certainty we never seem to possess. But it doesn’t teach us how to be lost, how to sit in the raw, open space where no one is watching, where there is nowhere to go…nothing to look for and nothing to prove.

But it’s exactly there where you must sit. Not because there is virtue in suffering or some noble prize to be claimed at the end of it all.