On Being Utterly Clueless
It’s easy to live this life really: accept what you’ve been told and follow the logical ladder that your culture and/or family laid out for you. If you’re lucky, you might even find a timeless Religious or Spiritual text to show you the way.
It’s possible to genuinely believe in the same ethics, rules and choices for an entire lifetime (or more). Seeds of doubt and conscious questioning avoided, any ideology, addiction or habit can reign supreme.
The truth is, this whole existence thing is an utter mystery, and it’s a noble thing (I believe) to admit to it.
Take gravity for example: we have no consistent, fixed measurement of gravity - it differs day by day and (sometimes quite drastically) from one place to another. This has always been the case, and yet it’s one of the most stable, unargued ‘truths’ Science has come to understand. Not only that, but it’s a force upon which so much of modern society has been built (think air travel, architecture, space exploration, warfare and even household goods and gym equipment).
The ordinary will accept gravity’s stable existence; the crazy will outright deny it; and the really curious will ask what we mean by ‘gravity’, how it actually functions and what nuances might be involved.
This example of gravity can be applied to anything (and everything) else in order to be consciously clueless if one chooses to be: monogamy, love, nutrition, nature, physical exercise, death, spirituality, politics, charity, money, business, psychology, truth, religion, art, poetry…
With cluelessness comes questioning and practical experimentation, resulting in real life change. With cluelessness also comes fear, confusion, alienation, mistakes and difficult decisions however - changes in relationships, work, language, haircuts and attire are common, as are tattoos, ferraris, trips to India, long runs, prison sentences, singing in the shower and/or prayers.
A clueless life is not for the feint-hearted. It’s for the true adventurer instead!
The most effectively clueless (much like the best adventurers), however, do so in small gradual doses. Imagine waking up on an unknown planet, not knowing another living being, the local language, culture, weather forecast or even how to breathe in the local atmosphere.
Obviously this is a recipe for disaster or certainly something we can’t handle too often…
Being clueless, in the best sense then, is to research, learn and integrate something new and useful. Too much ‘new’ will go unrealised and/or misunderstood; not enough ‘new’ and we don’t learn or grow at all.
That balancing act (or ‘finding the goldilocks zone’) is the way to go perhaps.
It’s not the ‘truth’ we often want or like - as people we like fixed routines, reliable proven strategies and single brain cell philosophies. We like the 5-page pamphlet version of the holy bible, do we not?
I’m not sure if we have much of a choice, however. The journey doesn’t end until it ends, and each moment, until the day we die, will be inviting us to be utterly clueless.
Whether we can do so with patience, diligence and grace is always up to us…
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