“This is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.” —Wislawa Szymborska, 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture

Before IDK and its emoji were ever conceived, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska championed the virtue of “I don’t know” in her 1996 Nobel Lecture. She had been living the truth of this virtue for decades. For uncertainty and unflagging curiosity may indeed help us fly “on mighty wings,” exploring “the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses.” In her Nobel address, she wrote:

If Isaac Newton had never said to himself ‘I don’t know’, the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself ‘I don’t know’, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying ‘I don’t know’, and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Undoubtedly, IDK may drive “restless, questing, spirits” onward toward certainties that benefit humanity in the form of answers and cures, inventions and solutions. It’s often the fuel powering our imagination and will. Szymborska understood this as a woman and a poet. At the beginning of the 20th century, when many poets set out to “shock us with their extravagant dress and eccentric behavior. . . for the sake of public display,” she argued that the real work of IDK happened privately and humbly:

The moment always came when poets had to close the doors behind them, strip off their mantles, fripperies, and other poetic paraphernalia, and confront – silently, patiently awaiting their own selves – the still white sheet of paper. For this is finally what really counts.

I’ve experienced both the terror and delight of “the still white sheet of paper.” As an undergraduate and graduate, I spent hours in the Calvin T. Ryan Library on the University of Nebraska Kearney campus, hunched over a spiral notebook, eking out one wretched sentence after another, only to scratch out most of what I’d written and begin again on another blank page. I knew what I didn’t know, and this knowledge was both a blessing and a curse. It saved me from writing “fripperies” and falling in love with first thoughts, but it also paralyzed me, taunting me with the reality that I may have nothing to say. Much as I longed to, I struggled to take the prevailing advice of writing experts: draft quickly and revise later. Before I’d even finished a thought, I was revising. Early in the writing process, I wrote with the red pen of a critic. It’s a miracle I ever finished a paper or poem. For me, IDK was—and continues to be—both friend and foe.

In the years since my retirement—years I’ve come to call my serious writing years— I’m finding that IDK is more helpful than adversarial. Subscribing to Szymborska’s claim that “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,’” I find myself surprisingly inspired. Though my poetic wheelhouse has always been the natural world of the Midwest, I recently began a series of poems about a fictional English manor house and the family who occupy it during the 19th and early 20th centuries. That I don’t know much about English manor houses hasn’t stopped me. Not yet anyway. I’ve created people and rooms, events and histories for a place and people I’ve come to know well. And the best part is this: I don’t know where any of this will lead me. I don’t know if any of these poems will ever see the light of day. I don’t know if they’ll live a brief life, only to be shelved in some unmarked notebook. I don’t know what I don’t know.

And I’m more than o.k. with this, just as Wislawa Szymborska was. For it’s the pursuit of knowing, which is both painful and wonderful, that inspires and culminates in something new:

Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre” (a complete body of work). . .

When I asked my poet father one day about revision, prompting him to tell me how many times he generally revised a poem, he answered, “30 times or more—usually more.” As a high school student, I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing, for I’d always envisioned my father and other serious writers as those from whom the right words flowed generously up from some eternal well of beauty and truth. Revising a single work at least 30 times sounded arduous, even painful. Truthfully, it sounded like grunt work. Yet, I’ve come to know the truth of revision, which, as Szymborska claimed, begins “as soon as the final period hits the page.” And I’ve come to embrace that not knowing is essential to trying and to “the consecutive results” of my “self-dissatisfaction,” which will be the body of work I leave behind.

There is also the kinder, gentler side to IDK. Poet Mary Oliver writes, “Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving.” As I’ve aged, increasingly I find myself surrendering to the fact that I don’t know a lot, that I’m “playing at the edges of knowing.” Like Oliver, German spiritual teacher and author Eckart Tolle argues the benefits of IDK, contending that “[s]ometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.” Certainly, there are circumstances when being too comfortable with not knowing may be dangerous and irresponsible. IDK may be an excuse to avoid philosophical, cultural, political, and scientific uncertainties that we should investigate. Still, if we’ve wrestled with these uncertainties and concluded that our struggles have taken us as far as they can, we can take comfort and find refuge in “not knowing.” For a time—maybe forever—we can be content in our pursuit of knowledge, whether it bears fruit or not.

We can admit, too, that an admission of IDK may be temporary. In time and with experience, we may discover what we’ve failed to understand. Years ago, as I was desperately seeking treatment for the migraines that had plagued me for most of my adult life, I recall a conversation with my new doctor. I had asked him about a new migraine drug I’d researched, and he confessed that he didn’t know anything about it. After years of doctors obfuscating and offering glib treatment options, his humility was a wonderful thing. Finally, here was a doctor who knew what he didn’t know—and admitted it. Even better, here was a doctor who promised to follow up, conduct a drug study, and call me when he had answers. Weeks later, he did just that, and his efforts changed my life, giving me more migraine-free days than I could’ve imagined.

And then there is this: “It is much easier to be brave if you do not know everything. And so your mama does not know everything. Neither do I. We know only what we need to know.” These words are from Lois Lowry’s Holocaust novel, Number the Stars. In every age when conflict and uncertainty threatened to undo all that was good and true, some have managed to power on, marching forward to the adage: We know only what we need to know. This may sound foolish, blindingly naive, and short-sighted. It may read as a refusal to confront the horrors of war and poverty, a refusal to stand firm against evil. But I only have to imagine myself in such situations to understand the truth of Lowry’s words here. I only have to consider how many navigate today’s world with only the knowledge necessary for that day and that circumstance. For them, for us, IDK may be less an admission of weakness than of bravery.

There are many, many things I don’t know, and I’ll never know. Some of these things will trouble me to the edge of frustration and despair; others will inspire me, sweeping me onto the “still white sheet” of paper and life. Perhaps we need a second emoji choice: an IDK with the face of wonder and contentment. This would be an emoji I could get behind.

photo by Collyn Ware

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. —W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

The world, as Yeats declares, is “more full of weeping” than a child can understand—than a child should understand. And even at the cusp of adolescence, my grandson, Griffin, has yet to fully cross that inevitable threshold to understanding. There are so many moments when he is still that bare-chested little boy in a straw hat stirring the water with a stick, that sweet child who flings my front door open and exclaims, “I’m here! What are we doing today?” Too soon, he will leave this child behind. But not this summer, not today. Today, we have the “waters and the wild,” the magic of each new day, which breaks golden and true.

A few weeks before Griff’s 12th birthday, we stood at the edge of the pond in a small cove where bluegill spawn and school. As he looked into the water, he turned to me and said, “This is so beautiful.” Tears sprang to my eyes. We stood in silence for several moments watching the fish. We’ve shared so many moments like this during his 12 years. Griff sees the uncommon beauty in the most common things. He will stop to marvel at uniquely shaped rocks on the road. He will find the one red, ripe strawberry in a patch and eat it before he leaves the garden. He will uncap and smell any scented candle or bottle of cologne, his sense of smell always active and finely tuned. He will wax nostalgic about holiday memories and family traditions. From the moment I first held him, he captured my heart and recaptures it daily.

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,” writes American lyrical poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Or when people die, their deaths are so removed they don’t wholly register. In Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Indian Camp,” a boy about Griff’s age makes a trip with his physician father across the lake to the Indian camp where a woman is in labor and needs assistance. The woman’s husband has been injured and lies in the bunk above her. Unable to help, he has listened to her screams for hours and, in a final act of desperation, takes his own life. The boy, Nick, witnesses this death and the cesarean section his father performs without an anesthetic. In the final lines of the story, Hemingway tells us that Nick rests against his father as they row back across the lake toward home, quite certain that he will never die. When one is very old or when the circumstances of one’s death are so foreign and so unnatural (a suicide at an Indian camp), it’s understandable that children may believe they will never die. Death is a distant galaxy. It might be glimpsed through a high-powered telescope, but its presence is a suggestion, not a cruel reality.

The child in Griff believes I can easily sprint across the lawn to retrieve the baseballs he’s hit. In the kingdom of his childhood, I will be forever young—or young enough to stave off infirmity and death. At 12, however, he’s begun to see the slower, less able me. When I didn’t move quickly enough and took a wiffle ball to the chest last week, he gasped. “Are you o.k., Grandma? I’m so sorry—are you o.k.?” Of course, I was o.k. I can still take a wiffle ball to the chest and stay in the game. But it was his quick concern that struck me. In that moment, I could see the shadow that crossed his face, the understanding that I was older now, that I would die. And even as I wished I could wipe away the shadow, he squared up at the plate and hit a ball deep into our neighbor’s yard. Smiling, I said, “That was a great hit.” Grinning, he replied, “I just love the sound the ball makes when it connects with the bat like that, don’t you?” And I knew that for tonight at least, we could both live happily in the kingdom of his childhood.

In her novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy writes, “Childhood tiptoed out. Silence slid in like a bolt.” This is the painful thing about the loss of childhood: it often comes with silence that slides in “like a bolt.” I want to hold on to the noisy Griff, the boy who talks your ear off and shouts as he leaps off the edge into the pool. When he was young and wanted to be a bull rider, he used to flail around the room, throwing his right arm in the air, whooping and hollering as I counted off 8 seconds. Then he’d collapse in a sweaty heap on the rug, panting and looking up expectantly as I announced, “Griffin Ware riding Red Rock, a new world record!” If anything, I don’t want Griff’s childhood to tiptoe out. I want it to go with whooping and hollering, to make a noisy last stand.

For every child, I suspect there is a parent or grandparent who wishes they could delay the onset of adulthood. It’s an unrealistic but universal wish. We consider the adult world our children must navigate, and we hold fast to those last days of innocence. In his novel, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy writes:

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

I’m afraid it’s just this: we suspect if our children knew the truths of adult life, they’d “have no heart to start at all.” We chuckle when kids declare they will grow up to be professional athletes, rock stars, and billionaires. Let them dream, we say. We want them to imagine the lives they want to live. Yet, we also want them to have the heart to grow up and take on the real responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. If we send mixed messages, we confess it’s with the best intentions.

Griff just returned from a minor league baseball game. For a day, he had a VIP experience as he lived his dream. He spent time in the dugout, took photos with players, and came home with a signed jersey and too many memories to count. Like many boys his age, he can see himself taking the field and hitting the winning run in a championship game. The dream of becoming a professional baseball player is still alive and flourishing, even as the painful reality of its unlikelihood lurks in the dugout. I want Griff to have the heart to dream these dreams for as long as he can. And then I want him to have the heart to embrace new dreams as he moves into adulthood.

In truth, I could say so much more about this boy who’s blessed my life. I know that the day is coming when he won’t ask his grandma to pitch wiffle balls or ride around with him in our UTV. I know that he will soon experience a world that’s “full of weeping,” a world in which death abounds. This day will come soon enough. Until then, I will live happily with him in the kingdom of childhood. Neither of us can imagine a better place to be.