Before We Know

A Reflection on Cultivating Community

On Friday last week I spent two hours with sixteen people scattered across Canada, the United States and Britain at the magical Cultivating Community process facilitated by Peter Pula, on Zoom, every fortnight for more than six years. Most of us in the community have never met outside the zoom room.

What struck me about this call was what people were carrying. Grief, anxiety, weariness and a sense that the world is falling apart. I suspect some people on the call were living with illness, others with fractured relationships, political turmoil, or the pain of watching familiar certainties fall away. Many different stories and circumstances, with a shared desire beneath them all.

• I need to understand

• I need to know what’s happening

• I need clarity

• I need to find my way

• If I could only navigate this

These are everyday desires that we hardly ever question. Of course we need understanding before we can move forward. Of course clarity should come before action.

But I think this assumption deserves more careful attention.

• Why do we believe that knowing must come first?

Somewhere in modern culture lies the belief that uncertainty is a problem to be solved. That life is a puzzle and we have to find its answer.

But perhaps life has never been about waiting for certainty. The seasons don’t pause for the oak to understand Spring. Birds don’t postpone migration until they possess a complete map of the world. A child doesn’t master biomechanics before taking a first step. Most life is quite capable of moving before the understanding arrives. Vitality does not demand knowing. Perhaps knowing diminishes vitality.

Maybe we ‘grown ups’ are unusual? Perhaps we have confused our maps with the landscape. I wonder whether our longing to know is something more than curiosity or insecurity? Perhaps it is an attempt to negate uncertainty. But certainty never seems to arrive, the future remains unknowable and other people beyond our comprehension. The tragedy is not that we don’t know enough but that we don’t seem able to relax into life until we do, and we can never know enough.

Many of the world’s wisdom traditions seem to offer another possibility, not certainty, explanation or control, but participation.

• The Tao is walked before it is described.

• The Kingdom is entered before it is defined.

• Whitehead’s universe creates itself moment by moment before philosophy catches up with it.

The painter begins with an empty canvas, the writer with a blank page, not with certainty. The musician trusts the next note before hearing it. Years of practice make possible a surrender to something that thinks and moves beyond conscious thought.

Perhaps life asks something similar of us? Not a resignation, or abandoning thought, but allowing thought to be our companion, or servant, rather than our commander.

The question is not whether we should try to know, of course we should. Knowing has its place. But so do discernment, memory, imagination, grief, attention, conversation, resistance, rest, courage and love. The problems start when knowing claims superiority and excludes other forms of awareness. When it insists that nothing can happen safely until the mind has understood, classified, explained and approved it.

But there is another way, a life of fidelity to the awareness that moves within us before we have words for it. Before we have slotted it into our conceptual frameworks, our own worldview. The possibility of fidelity to the unease that tells us something is out of whack, or to the unexpected enthusiasm that draws us towards an action that we cannot rationalise. Fidelity to grief that refuses to be hurried and to life that continues to move through us, even when our explanations have run out.

This is an invitation to place knowledge back within a larger ecology of being, where knowing becomes one act of fidelity among many.

• Thinking has its place, alongside listening.

• Analysis beside imagination.

• Discernment beside compassion.

• Explanation beside wonder.

None is in charge, each serves the whole. We still think, seek understanding and ask questions, but no longer demand that life submit itself to our understanding before we can participate joyfully in it. Instead, we begin with attention. We listen, we wait and we feel for the thread that is already moving through our lives. The vital force that animates us, or humanises us?

Sometimes it appears as a conviction, or an invitation we cannot quite explain, sometimes a sense of peace that arrives without reason, and sometimes as the next faithful step. Only afterwards does understanding begin to build around what we have already lived.

Perhaps this is how wisdom works, not as the accumulation of certainty, but as fidelity to the life force that is continually creating the world anew, and continually inviting us to participate in its unfolding.

As our conversation drew to a close on Friday, I found myself wondering whether what many of us really needed was not another explanation, but permission to stop wrestling life into concepts and to live fully within uncertainty without immediately trying to dissolve it. Permission to trust that awareness itself may know more than the mind can grasp. The awareness that notices beauty before explaining it and recognises kindness before defining it, that senses truth before proving it.

Perhaps clarity is not something we achieve, but something that gradually reveals itself as we remain faithful to the awareness that moves within us. If we can learn to follow that movement with care and humility, we may find that life can carry us all on.