Dear Reader,

There is a great deal of maturity and wisdom involved in the simple affirmation “I do not know”. You expose your weakness, you show your honesty even when it’s against your best interests, you do not put yourself in the way of finding an answer or a solution but speed up the process instead.

However, I’m not writing this blog to sound trite and to state evident matters (at least, I hope to be able not to perform just those feats!)

My point is that there is perhaps an even higher level of maturity in accepting the answer “I do not know”. Have you ever noticed the look of people who trust you when you proclaim your ignorance? The disbelief, the disconcertment, sometimes even the horror or the anger? I’m not talking about responses to “Do aliens exist” or “Who will win the lottery” type of questions, but to relevant questions on topics you are supposed to know about (e.g. you profession, your actions, your feelings)

Now let me change perspective: try to put yourself into the shoes of who is receiving the answer “I do not know”.

I’d like for you to examine your past looking for situations in which you got upset by the answer. Trust me, and you will find them if you are a human being!

To all of you who receive the dreaded answer, let me list a few possibilities you should ponder:

  1. The person has never looked into the matter. She was absent from that lesson. He didn’t get the mail. She was never interested in the first place.
  2. The question was about another person motives. A personal example from two days ago: my father asked me why a local politician was following him on Instagram. “How could I know? You better ask him directly.” My answer displeased everyone at the table, to my utter disbelief!
  3. The question is about a design choice, e.g. “Why do I need to press this button and then that to get to the function I need?” – “Well, I don’t know. I didn’t design the damn thing!”
  4. You are interrogated about a matter of feelings. “Why do you love her?”, “Why do you feel that way?”. Often we don’t know the answer, or at least we could not put it into words.
  5. Intuitions: “How do you know that it’s true?” You have not yet articulated the reason why, but you know the robustness of your gut feeling. Most of the brain functions without language, thought is not a stream of words but a variety of complex processes running in parallel, you need time and effort to explain an intuition. If someone is working with conviction on something, but he cannot tell exactly how and why, please don’t stop the flow. No one can do relevant work if an explanation is needed continuously along the way.

Are there more possible cases? Will I always be able to cope with an “I don’t know” answer?

I don’t know…