Have you heard the saying that young people know everything, middle-aged people trust nothing, and older people believe everything? I am not sure who came up with it, but lately I have been thinking that perhaps it needs a small correction.

The longer I live, the more I learn, the more I experience, and the more people I meet, the easier it becomes to admit something that probably would have horrified my younger self: I don’t know everything. In fact, the more I discover about life, people, science, spirituality, and this rather mysterious universe we inhabit, the more aware I become of how much there still is to know.

When we are young, certainty often comes easily. We know how the world works, what other people should do, what governments should do, what our parents did wrong, and quite possibly how humanity could be fixed by next Tuesday. Then life begins adding footnotes.

People surprise us, events refuse to follow our plans, and ideas we once considered unquestionably true begin to look more complicated. People we disagreed with sometimes turn out to have a point, those we admired reveal themselves to be very human, and every now and then — usually at an inconvenient moment — we discover that we ourselves were wrong.

I once thought admitting that was a weakness. Now I see the ability to say “I don’t know,” “I may have been wrong,” or “Perhaps I need to look at this again” as a sign that we are still thinking.

There is something liberating about leaving the door open. Maybe there is more to the story. Maybe another person sees something we do not. Maybe science still has much to discover, some of our spiritual ideas deserve another look, and truth is larger than whichever explanation currently makes us most comfortable.

That openness seems especially important today, when we appear to be living in an age of spectacular certainty. Everyone has an opinion, many of us have several, and social media has made it possible to become an expert on almost anything between breakfast and lunch. By dinner, we may already be correcting someone who has spent thirty years studying the subject.

Technology moves quickly, opinions move even faster, while wisdom still seems to prefer walking.

Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly interested not only in what people believe, but in how they arrived there. Can we explore an unconventional idea without immediately deciding it must be true? Can we question an accepted idea without deciding it must be false? And, perhaps most difficult of all, can we change our minds without feeling that we have somehow lost?

Our beliefs are not our identity, nor are they museum pieces that must be preserved forever behind glass. They are working models built from what we know today, and when tomorrow brings better information, perhaps we should give ourselves permission to renovate.

This is where curiosity becomes so important. It allows us to investigate without immediately choosing a side, to ask uncomfortable or unconventional questions, and to remain open to the possibility that life may be far more complicated — and far more interesting — than any of us imagined.

At Enlightenment Media News, that is exactly the spirit I hope we can cultivate: to explore, question, listen, occasionally disagree, frequently laugh, and remain willing to reconsider what we think we know.

The longer I live, the more comfortable I become with three simple words:

I don’t know.

And perhaps that is not the end of the conversation.

Perhaps it is where the most interesting part begins.

Let’s find out.

— J.B. Gattini
Founder & Editor
Enlightenment Media News