Image created by Christine Callahan-Oke, The Unlost’s Positive Inspirational-Empowerer-Motivator-Person. Check out her blog, The Brighter Side of Life
Hello, wonderful!
In Module 2, you got an overview of the E & E (experimentation and evolution) process, and you learned that there are three preparatory steps you need to take in order to prepare for your E & E journey:
FIRST, you need to understand the NATURE of the journey. Rather than being an overnight, one-time, clear-cut journey from Point A to Point D, it’s actually a PROCESS that happens over time and that is continually unfolding.
YOU’RE ALREADY IN THE PROCESS NOW– and in fact, you’re probably a lot further along than you thought you were! Up until now, however, your process may have lead you to take “the default path”– it was accidental and left more or less up to chance. Now, using the E & E framework to guide you, your process can become clear, conscious, and deliberate.
SECOND, you need to take a Knowcation! Taking a Knowcation CLEARS THE PATH and allows room for new & unforeseen opportunities to show up in your life. This is the step that we’ll be exploring today in Sections 3.1 & 3.2.
And THIRD, you’ve got to calibrate your compass so you can be sure that you’re always heading in the right direction, even if you don’t know exactly what you’re headed for. We’ll start in on calibrating our compasses in Section3.3– and then in Module 4, once we’re properly prepared for our journeys, we’ll begin the “experimentation” phase of the E & E process.
With that, it is now time to explore preparatory step #2, the KNOWCATION!
TAKING A KNOWCATION
You don’t know what you want to “be when you grow up”— but you think that you should.
You don’t want to continue down the soulless path you’re on— the corporate ladder, the unsatisfying job that pays the bills but nothing else, the [fill-in-the-blank-here]— but you think that you should.
Should, should, should.
What if I told you something today that could change your life forever?
What if I told you that the “should” is a myth?
What if I told you the problem is NOT that we don’t have it all figured out…
Instead, it’s that we think we SHOULD have it all figured out.
The problem is that there’s this ridiculous expectation, this insane belief, this PREPOSTEROUS idea that we should know it all (thus the horrible affliction of the soul, Shoulditis).
Enter the second step in curing Shoulditis and preparing for your E & E journey:
The Knowcation.
What’s a Knowcation?
It’s a vacation from needing to know.
It’s a vacation from expectation.
It’s a period of time where you allow yourself to ask questions, to explore and to discover that deep well of thick, bubbling awesomesauce that lies within you.
The way I see it, the knowcation should be a required, or at least widely accepted, period of our lives. It ought to be the norm, the standard, the expected.
What if instead of sending their kids off to college after high school, parents sent their kids off on “Knowcations?”
“Bye bye, Johnny! Have fun on your Knowcation!”
And off Johnny goes into the world— off he goes to find himself.
Imagine a world where the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is replaced by “What have you learned about yourself during your Knowcation, son?”
This is the kind of world I want to live in one day.
Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.
– Henry David Thoreau
MY VERY FIRST KNOWCATION
In June of 2011, I had recently started writing The Unlost and I was still working at my accounting job. It was from this cubicle that I wrote a post about my first Knowcation, the first time in my life that I consciously and deliberately was able to let go of needing to know all the answers.
Here is what I wrote:
Why It’s OK to Be Lost and Confused
In the fall of 2007, I was confused as hell.
![[Image by milos milosevic]](http://kewlpeople.theunlost.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/questions-ahead.jpg)
[Image by milos milosevic]
Conventional wisdom would say, “Think hard and figure your sh** out at all costs.”
Instead, I did the opposite— I dropped the exhausting notion that I had to have it all figured out, and I dove head first into the deep waters of uncertainty.
I quit my job, applied for a year-long foreign work visa, and bought a one-way plane ticket to Australia. In January of 2008, I left the country without an inkling of a plan.
Today I’m going to tell you why this was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Against every bit of advice that’s ever been thrown at you, today I’ll propose a strange notion: that maybe it’s ok (in fact,maybe it’s more than ok) to not have it all figured out. In fact, maybe you’re here to learn just one thing: to embrace the mystery, the uncertainty, that is life. And perhaps the more that you learn to rest in this uncertainty, the closer you end up to those answers you were seeking in the first place.
START BY ASKING THESE TWO QUESTIONS
Before I made my decision to leave the country, I asked myself two simple questions that flipped my world upside down in an instant. When you’re deeply uncertain about life, these are the questions that it might behoove you to ask. The first question is simply this: what’s the worst that could happen if you let go of needing to know all the answers?
1. WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN?
What’s the worst that could happen if you let go of needing to know all the answers? As humans, we have a strange compulsion to figure everything out and to turn unpredictability into certainty. I wanted the answers to come to me like a flash of lightning. I imagined that this was how life worked; that I couldn’t be happy until I had every detail of my life squared away. I wanted to know what my “calling” was and who my soulmate was and where to find happiness and when life would finally make sense. I wanted to know who the heck I was.
But why this strange compulsion to know, to be certain? What would happen if I just stopped needing to know all the answers?
I asked myself this question and the only answer I could think of was this: the worst that could happen is that I won’t have it all figured out.
I thought about it for a few minutes more and came up with a few more blurbs:
The worst that could happen is that I’ll be 30 or 40 or 50 and I still won’t have it all figured out.
The worst that could happen is that I’ll never have it all figured out.
The worst that could happen is that everyone will think I’m some wandering, aimless, blob-of-a-person.
The worst that could happen is that I’ll end up lost in a sea of uncertainty and perceived judgment.
And then I thought, “Wait… that’s it?”
“Aren’t I lost in that sea already?”
And so I decided, well hey, I might as well be where I’m already at.
After all, my life wasn’t going to end if I didn’t know all the answers. I wasn’t going to fall off the edge of the earth or get eaten by a pack of bloodthirsty wolves. My Myspace page wasn’t going to get unexpectedly deleted. (Yes; I saidMyspace.)
The only thing that would happen is that I wouldn’t have it all figured out—which I already didn’t anyhow.
Ask yourself this question today and see if it shifts your perspective on things.
2. IS LIFE EVER CERTAIN?
The second question to ask yourself is this: can life ever be certain?
Is it even possible to have it all figured out? Does such a thing even exist?
If you find a calling or a career that you really love, who’s to say that your calling won’t change (or that it shouldn’t change)? Who’s to say that your path won’t evolve or that you won’t wake up one day without a job?
If you’ve found your lifetime love and your soulmate, who’s to say that your feelings won’t change or that this person will always feel the same way? Who’s to say that you might not lose that person someday?
Not to be depressing, but life is %&$ing weird, guys.
Who’s to say that any single thing in your life might not change in an instant?
Maybe life is a never-ending mystery, and your only job is to learn to be ok with that. It doesn’t have to be a scary thing; instead, it can be freeing. Once you can learn to trust and to feel safe within this blanket of a universe, then you no longer need to cling to a certainty that just doesn’t exist. You can rest in the questions; you can live in the bittersweet mystery.
HOW THE STORY ENDS
So did I come back from Australia knowing what I was meant to do with my life?
Nope. I came back from Australia just as confused as I had been when I left. I got a second college degree and I found a job and I bought a house, simply because I didn’t really know what else to do. And although I wasn’t wandering aimlessly as I had been before, I still felt lost.
But just as I had done before, I gave myself permission to feel this way. I learned to embrace the uncertainty and to live in it until it was no longer an enemy, but an awkward sort of friend (you know, the kind who stays at the party far longer than you want her to… but oh well). I learned to rest in the open-ended question that is life and to let myself steep in the mystery and the wonder of it all. Above all, I learned to trust.
Three years after my return home, I still rest in that open-ended question. I go to work every day and I still feel as ifthis isn’t quite it. After a 2 ½ year relationship, I find myself back at square one once again. I wonder if I am meant to live in this house or to travel the world; I wonder if I will ever find the right person or the right job (or if such a thing even exists). I still have no effing clue where my life is headed.
But at the same time, I have things figured out more than I ever have before. I’ve learned to look less to others for definition and more to myself. D-bags be forewarned: I no longer need your attention to feel like I’m somebody. For the first time in my life, I’d rather be alone than be untrue to myself.
When people ask me about my hobbies and my passions, they are no longer greeted with the blank stare of a girl who spends all her free time at the bars. Instead, my answer is simple: I love to create; I love to write; I love the strange feeling of connecting to people through something as simple as words on a page. This right here is what I love to do, and I’m doing it. So what if it’s not how I make a living— still, I am doing it.
Every day I am crumbling more apart and yet falling more together all at the same time.
I think that you’ll find the same thing to be true for yourself, if only you can remember one simple thing: it’s ok to be lost. It’s ok to let go of needing all the answers. It’s not going to kill you— in fact, it just might bring you to life.
A KNOWCATION IS AN ESSENTIAL STEP TO PREPARE FOR E&E
Taking a Knowcation is an essential step you must take in order to prepare yourself for E & E. Here’s why.
Taking a Knowcation is akin to clearing weeds from the garden of life (hahaha, how corny– the garden of life?!! Did I really just say that?!!): Only when you drop the certainty of needing to know can you leave room for glorious potential to unfold– for the new to emerge.
Only in allowing space for the unknown can it ever show up in our lives.
Let’s go back to the map analogy that I used to show you the E & E process back in the Module 2 introductory video. When the maps of our lives are crowded with a need for absolute certainty and knowing, then there’s no room for experimentation and evolution to take place. We end up taking the straight and narrow path– the “easy path” that’s right in front of us. We end up living “someone else’s life” because that’s the only path we can see and that’s all there’s room for.
We are so certain that this is how “things are supposed to be” that there is no room for a newer, truer path to potentially emerge.
But when we take a Knowcation, we clear the map. We clear the rubble and the roadblocks of “needing to know” and we start with a blank slate from which to explore, experiment, and evolve our way into opportunities that we never could’ve foreseen from the get-go.
At its core, taking a Knowcation is about opening to uncertainty, and in doing so, opening to possibility and to grand potential. By clearing out your need for certainty, you’re making space for exploration and evolution to occur.
When we’re clinging with certainty to the fact that we need to know what we’ll be doing for the rest of our lives– that we need to know exactly where we’ll end up, then there’s no room for the splendors of E & E to take place.
If you have no clue what you want to “be when you grow up,” can you allow yourself not to know, and in doing so, make space for infinite unknown possibilites to emerge?
If you do have an idea of what you want to do with your life, but you aren’t quite sure exactly what it’ll end up looking like or how you’ll get there, can you allow yourself not to know these things, and in doing so, make space for unknown possibilities to emerge?
A KNOWCATION TURNS FEAR & ANXIETY INTO WONDER
Instead of feeling anxiety and fear about your future and about the unknown, taking a Knowcation allows you to begin feeling excited about the space of pure potentiality that is your future.
Taking a Knowcation turns your question marks
into exclamation points.
It turns your questions into wonder and awe and mystery. The unknown becomes friendly, even exciting.
Most importantly, the unknown becomes safe.
Instead of stressing out about and trying to predict or figure out exactly what you “should” be doing with your life, instead of feeling a sense of anxiety about not having it all figured out, can you relax into the mystery of not knowing?
Can you soak in the mystery, in the unknown, as if you’re taking a big, warm, soothing bubble bath?
Paradoxically, you begin finding your way into your truest path by taking a vacation from needing to know all the answers– not by clinging to a need to know it all.
TRUST. STAY PATIENT. BREATHE.
Every single day of my life, I am taking a Knowcation– some days it comes easier than on other days, and yet I know that the way out is not in fact to be certain, but instead to to let myself melt, relax, into this question that is life– and to trust deeply that no matter what, I am safe, I am held, and I am headed in exactly the direction I need to be headed.
And whenever I start to get anxious or fearful or insecure about my path or about anything else, I close my eyes and I breathe. I remember that I don’t need to know all the answers– all I need to do is to trust and to continue living the process.
There’s a phrase– sort of a prayer, if you will– that I like to repeat to myself when I’m having a hard time:
In this moment I don’t know how [The Universe] is at work in my life.
I don’t need to.
What I do need is to trust that I am held in ways deeper than my knowing.
Help me, this day, to rest in the tender care and renewing presence of this life.
It’s OK to let go of knowing– some answers are simply out of your reach.
Trust.
Simply trust.
And breathe.
That’s what’s most essential.
Most of all, I stay patient. Taking a Knowcation– staying present with and living in the questions– it is a lifelong process. I trust that the answers are already in the process of blooming within me, staying patient, kind, and gentle with the questions, with the process, and most importantly, with myself.
If I were dying my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
QUESTION TIME:
[These are questions to consider for discussion within your group meeting, during your “Knowcation Station” drop-in sessions, and/or in the Facebook community]:
- Is a Knowcation something you “go on” and then come back from? Does it have to have a specific “endpoint,” or could it last… well, forever? (Could it be that perhaps LIFE is a Knowcation that never ends?)
- How do you reconcile the two seemingly contradictory acts of taking a Knowcation (i.e., letting go of your need to know all the answers and to control the outcome) and of taking active, deliberate steps forward to move in the right direction & to take control of your future? Do you think the two can coexist, and if so, what might this look like for you?
Leave your thoughts (& see what others have to say!) right over here in the private Unlost Facebook community.
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Next: Move on to Section 3.2: Common Misconceptions About Knowcations