I Don’t Know

Before I started school, my best friend was a boy named Tiger. He was my friend not because of his unusual name—the early 1950s was a time of Tims and Toms and Jims and Johns, not Tigers. He was my friend because early on in our friendship, at a party for another child in the neighborhood, when asked to separate into two groups, boys on one side of the room and girls on the other, Tiger stood in the middle and shook his head and cried. Later he told me he didn’t think he was a girl, but why did he always have to be a boy? Since then I have wondered if the invisible line down the middle of the room was the beginning of the division of everything for him, and that carried with it a sadness I could appreciate and understand, though I was not yet four.

A young friend of mine recently tried to kill herself by overdosing on her father’s muscle relaxants. I went to see her in the hospital and when I left I wrote down three words for her to tape to the wall above her bed: Absence of separation. She did not ask me what that meant or what it had to do with her. I think she understood.

I believe we are intricately knotted, one to the other, and not just we human beings, but all life. All life. Like a crossword puzzle where 68 down picks up 72 across which intersects with 84 down, there is no independent existence.

For Tiger, the convenience of gender—fixed gender—seemed not to exist. It had not yet been constructed in his mind. We could say that he did not know about it, that he was proceeding with the openness and ignorance of a child. This ignorance was the very thing that allowed him to feel his connection to the world, his absence of separation.

When people take a strong position based on all they know, they seldom consider the limits of their knowledge. Have they walked in the shoes of the person they are criticizing for terminating a pregnancy? Have they been on the receiving end of racial or sexist remarks? Have they considered the stress of being a single parent or a soldier or a senator? Have they ever thought about the indispensable nature of spiders and snakes, bats and bees? Instead of approaching an issue with openness and curiosity—a “Who are you and what’s your contribution to life on this spinning planet?”—there is a feeling of fear and rigidity, the closing of a door. This is a different form of ignorance than Tiger’s because it’s chosen, and it’s chosen because the alternative—to not know—is an acknowledgement of vulnerability in a world where certainty is preferred.

I believe in the connecting nature of I don’t know, and the redemptive power and freedom of acknowledging our great interdependence.