On Knowing, Unknowing, and Becoming

Knowing, in its fresh state, requires a stripping away of the labels we've just applied. It is a willingness to loosen the scripts—the "he always does this" or the "I am the kind of person who..."—that we cling to like a handrail in the dark. Without this, "knowing" becomes a closed loop. It's like looking at a photograph of a river and insisting it is the water itself. We stop seeing the movement; we only see the frozen frame.

Many connections stagnate for this reason. We assume we already know what this person will say. How they will react. What they mean. And so we remain stuck in the quagmire of an old truth — one that may never have been really true, or one that is no longer alive. This is not only true in how we meet others — it is first true in how we meet ourselves.

Knowing Thyself

There was a phase of my life marked by deep anger and cynicism. I could not move past it, not because I didn't want change, but because a part of me didn't want to let go of my identity of anger and distrust.

While my conscious self was committed to transformation, something deeper wasn't yet on board.

Anger had become a familiar, even comfortable—though painful—identity. It organized my posture, my expectations, my internal language. It shaped how I walked into rooms. It was the "I" I knew. To release it would mean stepping into an unknown version of myself. Who would I be without it? What would orient me? What would protect me?

This revealed something essential: transformation is not merely a decision; it is a negotiation between different layers of the self. The mind is a fast traveler; it can adopt a new philosophy in an instant. But the nervous system is a slow, ancient animal. It stores the 'known self' as a survival map.

To my mind, anger was an obstacle. To my body, anger was a fortress.

When I tried to force change, my system didn't see 'growth'—it saw the demolition of its defenses. This is why we experience that frustrating lag between knowing better and doing better. Our cells are still bracing for a threat that our intellect says is gone.

So I had to wait. Not passively, but with a regulated, active patience. I had to prove to my own physiology, through repeated moments of quiet presence, that I would not collapse without the armor of my cynicism. I had to sit in the 'unknowing' until my pulse didn't quicken at the thought of being vulnerable. Eventually, the anger loosened—not because it was forced out, but because the animal of the self finally felt safe enough to lay its burden down.

What we do internally, we inevitably do relationally.

Knowing the Other

We rarely encounter others as they are.

Marcel Proust captures this with devastating precision:

"We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with the ideas we already formed about him… In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice, that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope—so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen."

When we sit across from a partner or a friend, we often aren't looking at the living, breathing human in front of us. Instead, we are looking at a composite sketch of every mistake they've made, every habit that grates on us, and every role we've assigned them.

Our ideas of them become a shrink-wrap around their actual presence. You can see this in the "pre-emptive sigh" before they even speak, or the way we stop listening halfway through their sentence because we've already finished it for them in our heads. We aren't in a relationship with a person; we are in a relationship with our own convenient interpretation.

Sometimes, the greatest gift we can give someone is the "unknowing" of their past. When we stop insisting they be consistent with their 2018 self, we finally leave the door cracked open for them to walk through as someone new.

Eckhart Tolle once described a friend who would drop his drinking and bad attitude simply by living in his home for a few days. Not because he was corrected or confronted, but because Tolle did not carry a rigid story of who this person was. In that openness, the friend could meet a different version of himself.

Transformation often requires at least one person who can see us anew.

Evoking Transformation

This alchemy of "unknowing" is a solitary labor, but it is a rigorous one. It is difficult to be both the observer and the observed—to feel the walls of the cage while trying to map the exit. We are often the last ones to notice our own "shrink-wrap" because it has become our second skin.

This is where the presence of a witness becomes catalytic. I know this terrain because I still walk it. Sitting with others as they loosen an old identity has sharpened my awareness of how tightly I cling to my own. The cage is not theoretical to me. I've felt its bars.

When someone begins to question who they've been, the shift is rarely dramatic. It's subtle. A breath catches. A certainty hardens. A rehearsed reaction arrives early. And instead of correcting it, we stay with it. We notice the body bracing — the loyalty to the familiar self tightening again.

In those conversations, I am not outside the process. I am simply less entangled in their particular story. That small distance allows me to see what they cannot yet see — just as others have done for me. Not to build a better version of them, but to hold steady while something quieter begins to emerge. The work of change begins to feel less like effort and more like contact.

Contact with the tightening.
Contact with the defense.
Contact with the moment the system realizes it does not have to fight.

Questions Worth Sitting With