“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.