A Letter from Joanne Greenberg: In Praise of Not Knowing
Introduction
Jeffrey Fortuna
I am honored to introduce this brief essay written by my friend Joanne Greenberg. She mailed this to me with the following note:
Dear Jeff – It was great to see you. I hope what I said was clear and cogent. You asked me to write a little essay on not knowing, and here it is: (I hope you like it). I don’t know what your plans for this were, if any, but there are my thoughts on the project. Let me know.
The topic of “not knowing” is a running theme in our dialogues with Joanne. In Windhorse Journal #051, “Swimming Lessons,” Joanne reflects on her recovery from psychosis, “I don’t know when it changed or how it changed. People ask me, ‘How did you get well?’ and I respond, ‘I haven’t a clue.’” Later in that discussion, she said that those of us who engage as therapists show much courage because we “don’t know how it works.” Joanne shared that her therapist had said to her, “What I am asking of you in our work is like diving off a diving board while not knowing if there is water in the pool. Trust me.”
There were long moments in dialogue with Joanne where I felt anxious and even defensive as I heard her doubting my certainty about what I think I know about people and therapy after fifty years of trying. She kept gently attempting to bring me along, to help me relax my compulsive self-identification with conceptual positions, which seemed heightened in talking with her. I had glimpses of my own childhood fears of being forever swept away in a vast dark sea of confusion—my personal nightmare of not knowing. What Joanne was sharing was not foreign to me, yet the fact that she seemed so at-home with not knowing—and so free in that way—touched me in a way that I could really hear. I hear that tensing up against and resisting the truth of not knowing brings the backlash of the nightmare of the unknown. I also hear the warning of my healer-mentor Edward Podvoll,
The pride that can developing insidiously in healers of any kind is well-known. Along with some expertise in alleviating suffering comes respect and considerable personal power, as well as the tendency for the healer to become deluded by pride. In the case of the psychotherapist, this translates into a pride that one understands the mind of others, that one knows what is best for them, and that one has the privilege of imposing one’s will or prescription on them. (Recovering Sanity, 2003, p. 335)
As I write this introduction, I recall the words of one of my other teachers, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He also taught about the vulnerability and the workability of not knowing. He writes in “Attitude Toward Death in the Healer-Patient Relationship”:
We all speak the same language; we experience a similar type of birth and a similar exposure to death. So there is bound to always be some link, some continuity, between you and the other. It is something more than mechanically saying “Yes, I know; it hurts very badly.” Rather than just sympathizing with the patient, it is important to actually feel her pain and share her anxiety. You can then say “Yes, I feel that pain” in a different way. To relate with total openness means that you are completely captured by someone’s problem. There may be a sense of not knowing quite how to handle it and just having to do your best, but even such clumsiness is an enormously generous statement. So, complete openness and bewilderment meet at a very fine point. (The Sanity We Are Born With, 2005, p. 157)
In this brief essay, Joanne shares her encouraging loving touch, which is palpable in the reading. I invite you to read this beautiful “little essay on not knowing” a few times. Let it sink in. As far off as they may seem, courage and hope are just around the corner.
In Praise of Not Knowing
My mother-in-law declared that people never wanted to know if a disease was fatal. I told her I did want to know, for very practical reasons. There are ends to tie up and people whose friendship I wanted to acknowledge—a call like that had come for me from a hospital room that I'll treasure the rest of my life.
I want to know what's going on in my government, family, and neighborhood. I want to know the opinions of people I love, even if they may be difficult to reconcile with mine.
But the circumstances of life on Earth are such that I can't know what will happen five minutes from now, much less my end, or the ends of everyone! know and love. Would it be good to know? The thought is enchanting, and the wish is one we experience all the time. “If only I had known, I would have...” “Had I foreseen the future, I never would have...” While it would be a comfort to know that the operation would be a success, or that the handicapped child would make her way in the world, or that the tyrant would die in the ruins he created, who would make a start on what he knew would fail? Failure is a better teacher than success, but who signs up for such lessons?
To know everything is to be perfect. Perfect means “finished.” Finished means changeless, and changeless means never learning anything more or different. Not to know implies the need to learn more of what can be known, and that implies a struggle to grow and change. Not knowing is the call to courage. I admire us because of courage—the courage it takes to wake up, wash up, dress, eat breakfast, and go out, unknowing, into what Alan Dugan, the poet, calls “the daily accident.” Knowing everything, we wouldn't need seat belts, but the biggest victim of knowing would be the loss of our most prized possession: Hope.
Every animal tried because every one hopes. I suspect that amoebas don't race around mindlessly, even if they are unknowing. We can live without knowing—can we live without courage or hope? Would we want to?
