Practicing the Art of Not Knowing

notes on beauty, uncertainty and the charm of leaving things unfinished

I’ve been reading the beautiful, cozy book by Frances Mayes called “A Place in the World” which is an alluring read on finding the meaning of Home. You probably know her book and the movie Under the Tuscan Sun —the honey-colored house, the slow lunches under fig trees, the cracking plaster walls, the romance. The thing that has stuck with me is the way that Mayes lets things be unfinished. Incomplete. Beautifully unresolved.

In one passage, she mentions an idea that sent me down a rabbit hole of research (while lying on the beach, naturally) which is known as Negative Capability. It’s a Romantic literary theory coined by John Keats many moons ago.

Keats described it as:

“...when someone is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Ah, what we need right now. It’s about resisting the urge to tie everything up neatly and letting things remain open. It’s allowing the question to hang in the air without rushing to solve it.

Lately, it feels like an instruction for how to move through this particular phase of life with all of the world’s chaos and questions —especially when so much life demands clarity, certainty, a caption, a call-to-action, a takeaway.

Instead, I’m working on learning to linger and letting go of the need for every moment to be “productive”. To see that not knowing can actually feel expansive, creative and even more interesting.

The Art of Not Knowing

I’ve been softening the way I look at things, too. I’ve always cooked more from instinct than from recipes as I prefer to go by taste, feel, memory. I don’t pack outfits for trips, I just bring what I love and trust I’ll feel it out in the morning. We sold our dream house with no true plan and ended up living the most magical year in 800 sq feet. These are small things (and some big), but they feel like practices in Negative Capability. They leave me feeling more creative, adventurous and a bit rebellious. Maybe this is the reason I didn’t like math in school — the somewhat boring nature of just one right answer.

I feel like we have to tap into a kind of grace to be able to live inside questions instead of solving them. To let beauty exist without asking it to prove itself. Keats’ idea feels like permission to celebrate the unfinished, the half-formed, the moment mid-bloom.

• linen pants creased from an afternoon nap

• a half cut lime from last night’s cocktail

• gardening with no promise of bloom

• the line between dreaming and waking

• a message you almost send

• my kid’s bikes haphazardly left in front of the cottage’s jasmine covered fence that annoys me most days

• unfinished rooms with only a chair or two

• collection sketches that are half way thought through

• a line from Ray Bradbury of “Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain consciousness.”

As Frances Mayes explains in her book, great uncertainty in life calls for “a liquid state in which you float, dream and take in the view.” Let me know ways you are moving through this too.

From my sofa to yours, with tea cooling beside me in an unfinished living room —

Liz

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