On Not Knowing

It was a day in December. Snow had covered the world outside in a gentle silence and I was sitting with my grandmother sipping hot tea talking about her experience of the Second World War and the complicity of so many ordinary Germans in the Holocaust.

“Do you think it could happen again?” I ask her.

She says “Yes, people are so easy to influence and so often we are not taught to question – questioning is not taught as a value. Where loyalty to a party, religion, belief or anything else begin to harden – this will become possible again”

As I walk home through the snow a little later her words spring up again in my mind...

Holding on and defending a belief, the striving and the conviction of being right – maybe that is what lies at the core of violence, of hurting each other and ourselves. What drives us into needing to be right? What drive us into having to hold on to the world as we see it and understand it?

Maybe it is the fear of being unsure. What is it that remains if I cannot be sure? What does it mean to “not know” in my personal life and what does it mean within groups, societies and between nations? Not knowing is often seen as a weakness. Those who have the courage to be unsure are exploited and abused by those who believe to be right – right about a belief, a worldview, or even just in defence of a personal interest. I guess we have all been in both of these positions.

What is it that gives us the strength and the guidance to make a choice without being sure and without knowing? And how do we still live and relate in a community and a society of different realities?

I think this is one of the questions we explore in Aikido practice. We practice to be in touch with this strength that does not depend on being right, to be in touch with that strength inside us, inside the movement and inside the relationship with another human being. Uke attacks and again and again we want to be right. The “I” pushes through. Separation creeps in and we want to “do” the technique, want to throw uke. And if we don’t uke becomes overpowering, we lose our centre or feel lost. But both of those ultimately hurt both us and uke.

Without really “knowing” I have found that in Aikido practice we search for a different way marked by a deep trust, openness and a strong gentleness that leaves all separation behind. But where do this trust, openness, strength and gentleness come from if we cannot find it in being right and in being sure?

I stop, reaching for my keys.

What a wise grandmother I have...