When you think you know and it turns out you don’t.

When you totally believe that you’ve seen the light, and then somehow, somewhere, you find another light, a different light.

When you’re convinced that you finally found the truth in or about something, and you rest in that for a while, only to get the sense that it might not be that simple.

And it turns out it wasn’t.

When those things happen, you get less arrogant.

Or, well, you CAN get less arrogant.

More real.

More stupid, in a way.

How many times can you realize you’ve been full of shit about something that made perfect sense until it stopped doing that, and not change, not open up?

It seems that we need to defend what we believe in because finding out it’s not the truth might shatter us.

We need to fall in love with stuff and defend it, obviously.

We need it and do it until we don’t need it anymore.

Until we start to see the repetitiveness of our stubbornness, our questionable certainty, and realize our lack of a truly open mind.

It’s like being a ball in a pinball machine, trying to stick to a specific side, to the flipper, or to the thing that automatically bounces you back.

Doesn’t work.

WILL not work.

I’ve been putting stuff in my head for as long as I can remember.

Thousands and thousands of ideas and methods and ways to navigate life.

Quotes, mantras, affirmations, exercises.

Sensible stuff, well-researched stuff, stuff that has been taught and practiced for ages, by sages.

But no matter what I try to absorb, no matter how excited I am the first time I read about it or become aware of it, it just disappears, eventually, and I am left with…

Huh?

Nothing really sticks or stays.

Nothing keeps making sense.

Nothing becomes The Thing I Do And Sell.

It just vanishes, completely.

I’m watching the grey Amsterdam sky from my window, while a few men are collecting the garbage.

Cars are forced to slow down in the afternoon traffic jam.

It’s raining.

And after all these years of crazy hard work, I still don’t know what ‘it’ really is.

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(Photo by @matthewhenry, for Unsplash)