Week 103: Exploring Unknowns

A colleague shared the following quotation with me, which has played in the back of my mind ever since: “I cannot know the unknown if to the known I cling.” It’s from Robert Fisher’s book, “The Knight in Rusty Armor.” As I listened to her say those words, I thought of the power of having courage in the face of the unfamiliar, and the ways in which our willingness to take risks allows us to open doors and make new discoveries. I thought about the risks I’ve taken in my life, and how they turned out – which ones I have valued from the beginning and those that I’ve only recently noticed added a great deal to who I am today.

What are the areas where you tend to pull back, to be afraid to step into a new situation, to move away from, rather than toward, an unfamiliar experience? Notice what kinds of thoughts come to mind when you imagine stepping from the known into the unknown. What happens in your body? What emotions emerge in the presence of the “as-yet-to-be-revealed”?
For this week’s experiment, allow yourself to play with what happens if you let go of the known once this week and engage something that’s unfamiliar. I’m not encouraging you to take big risks, or to stretch yourself way beyond your comfort zone. Instead, I’d like to offer an opportunity for you to explore those places where you pull back from what’s unfamiliar, from the unknown, and to notice what happens if you make a choice to engage – rather than avoid – new experiences. For example, you might have an invitation to go to a lecture that you normally wouldn’t attend because you won’t know anyone there. Or, you might have an opportunity to taste a kind of food you haven’t eaten before. Where you might ordinarily say an automatic “no” to a situation or experience, perhaps this time you could stick a toe in the new waters and see how it feels.

These kinds of opportunities are constant, and this experiment invites you to pay attention to them and to notice what it’s like if you choose to engage something “unknown” and allow it to become part of your known world. The purpose of the experiment is to be willing to check something out, to engage it (if you want to do so) rather than automatically pushing it away. So many of us have mixed feelings about the unfamiliar and the unknown that we develop habits of pushing away these kinds of experiences without thinking about what we’re doing. This experiment provides an opportunity to look at these old habits and notice if they still serve you.

As with every other experiment, please engage this one with curiosity, as well as a sense of play. Allow yourself to be an explorer, checking out something new without any expectation or demand that you have to respond in a particular way or even like what you discover.

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