(no subject)

[kradeelav]

When you learn to live with uncertainty, when you learn to surrender a little, when you learn to see yourself as beautiful and worthy even as your life seems crumpled and wrong, when you own exactly what you are — whatever the fuck you are! — without trying to explain it or sell it or cover it up, you become formidable and effortlessly impressive. Practice saying “I don’t fucking know!” with humility, with humor. Shit happens, that’s all. Shit never stops happening. You do not arrive somewhere someday where no more shit happens. This is how it feels to be an adult, and if you accept that and embrace it, you will see how much happiness flows out of every crisis. If you fear it and get defensive and hardened and walk away instead of facing it head on, you will only learn how to become a perfectionist who quits and hides and is plagued by fear forever.

Don’t do that. Learn to be an imperfect, uncertain person who embraces reality even when it’s scary, who lives out in the open, who recognizes the enormous power of owning up to her own flaws.

—

Ask Polly: I’ve Failed at Everything I Worked to Achieve

All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power with a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they, too, perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes; but they ‘know,’ and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish the force of their arguments. But any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.

— Wisława Szymborska, from “The Poet and the World” (1966 Nobel Lecture), trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

(via idionkisson)