What You Don't Know: A Beginning

I was thinking about the years of my early to mid-twenties when it became clear to me that so many things that I thought I knew, in fact, I did not know. Furthermore, I was beginning to get an inkling of the vast, infinite amount of things that I hadn't even known that I didn't know. 

It was incredibly eye opening and incredibly exciting to begin to appreciate that there is so much more to the world than I had ever considered before. Suddenly my world grew enormously small and enormously large at the same time. 

In those moments of realizing that the number of things that you don't know that you don't know, several things begin to happen. First, something like Imposter Syndrome sets in, that niggling doubt that you are a fake in the world, that everyone know that you have no idea what you're doing,  that you're not as knowledgeable as you thought you were, or the fear that your inexperience will always be a detriment... 

That part of the mind-expanding can feel painful as it points out how new your mind is to the world of thought. Then along comes the excitement, that fresh awareness that your opportunities are endless. That certainty that adventure lies ahead. The thrill of potential.

Interestingly, even the thinking about the fact that there are many things that you don't know that you don't know increases the things that you know. And that thinking puts you into the realm of even more things that you didn't know that you didn't know. 

It can be very heady.
It can be very frightening.

Learning that there is much that you don't know that you didn't even know is the beginning of a new chapter in your life. It's the very moment that you realize: I can know new things!
It's the beginning of getting to know yourself and the world around you. 

It's the beginning of a new life.


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