Episode 54: You Haven’t Met All of You

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Think about someone in your life who really matters to you. There was a time when you had no idea they existed. You were living your life, they were living theirs, and then somehow your paths crossed. You couldn’t see them coming or know what they would eventually mean to you. You just hadn’t met them yet.

It’s such an obvious thing when you say it out loud, but I love what it reveals about the way we experience our lives. We know so much more looking backward than we ever could looking forward. Once something happens, we can see how the pieces connected. Before it happens, we’re working with whatever is in front of us and trying to make decisions without knowing what else might eventually become part of the picture.

And yet, we put an incredible amount of pressure on ourselves to figure it all out anyway. Something catches our attention and almost immediately we want to know what we’re supposed to do with it. An idea starts forming and suddenly we need to know whether it’s good, where it could lead and whether it’s worth our time.

Sometimes I want to tell my own brain: I just got here. Can I look around first?

How much do we hold ourselves back trying to figure out what everything means when maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet?

We Can’t See the Chain While We’re Making It

I’ve always been an idea person. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is my willingness to follow an idea for a while before demanding that it prove itself. Some go nowhere, and I’m perfectly fine with that. Others bump into something unexpected. One thought leads to a conversation, the conversation changes the way I’m looking at something, and before long I’m somewhere I never would have thought to aim for when the original idea showed up.

Usually, the connection becomes obvious afterward. That’s the strange advantage hindsight gives us. We can look back at a job, a decision, a person we met or something we almost didn’t do and see what came from it. At the time, it was simply the thing happening in front of us.

The butterfly effect plays with this idea on a much bigger scale. A small change in a complex system can eventually contribute to a very different outcome. I’m not particularly interested in turning this into a lesson on chaos theory. It’s the chain that fascinates me, especially when I think about how often we try to see one before it exists.

We can’t see the chain while we’re making it.

We want to know where the job leads before we take it or what an idea will become before we try it. We wonder whether something will be worth our time before we’ve given it any. There are absolutely moments when hesitation is telling us something important, but there are also plenty of times when nothing is wrong. We simply don’t know yet.

Not Knowing Isn’t the Same as Being Lost

I think that distinction matters. This doesn’t feel right and I can’t see what happens next can feel similar, but they aren’t the same thing. One gives us information about where we are. The other asks us for information about a place we haven’t reached.

That’s where thinking can become a trap. We turn something around from every possible angle hoping that eventually we’ll think our way into certainty. Sometimes that extra thought is exactly what we need. Other times, we’re asking the same question over and over without giving ourselves anything new to answer it with.

Eventually, movement can tell us more than another hour of thinking. Have the conversation. Look into whatever keeps catching your attention. Give the idea a little room. None of those things require a lifelong commitment. They simply give you more information than you had before, and then you get to decide again.

That’s why I’ve gotten much more interested in a smaller question.

Do I want to know what happens if I keep going?

I can answer that one from where I’m standing. I don’t need to know what happens ten steps from now. If I’m curious enough to take another one, I’ll know more when I get there.

You Haven’t Met All of You Yet

There’s another problem with expecting ourselves to see the entire path ahead: we tend to forget that we’re one of the variables.

Think about how many things you know about yourself now because life gave you a chance to find out. There are situations you handled without knowing beforehand how you would respond. Skills you discovered because you tried something for the first time. Interests that developed because something caught your attention long enough for you to explore it. None of that information was available to you until you lived it.

That process is still happening. There will be experiences you haven’t had, people you haven’t met and things you’ll learn that change the way you think. Some of it will probably confirm exactly what you already know about yourself. Other parts may surprise you.

You haven’t met all of you yet.

I don’t mean that there’s some secret version of you waiting to appear. I mean something much simpler. You haven’t lived all of your life yet, so there are things about yourself you couldn’t possibly know from where you are now.

That doesn’t make who you are today incomplete. It means you’re still alive. You’re still learning, experiencing things and getting new information. I know myself pretty well, but I hope I never become so certain about who I am that I leave no room to surprise myself.

You Don’t Need the Whole Path

We give hindsight a lot of credit because everything looks cleaner from that direction. Once we know what happened, we can tell the story in order. This happened, which led to that, and now I understand how I ended up here.

Forward has blank spaces.

People are missing from the picture because we haven’t met them. Information hasn’t arrived because nothing has happened to give it to us. We’re making decisions with what we know today, and somehow we expect ourselves to have the clarity of someone looking back five years from now.

Of course we don’t.

That doesn’t mean we have to throw common sense out the window or wander around blindly trusting that everything will work out. It means we can make a thoughtful decision with the information we actually have without requiring ourselves to predict everything that comes next.

Something can feel right without being certain. A direction can be worth exploring without becoming a permanent commitment. Changing course later doesn’t automatically make the decision you made today a mistake. Sometimes you simply know more by then.

You don’t need to know the whole path to feel like you’re on the right one.

There’s a lot less pressure in that. Instead of trying to solve the entire future, we can pay attention to where we actually are. Does this still feel worth following? Is there anything telling me to stop? Am I curious enough to see what happens next?

Sometimes that’s enough.

How Much Life Do We Miss Trying to Explain It?

This may be the part I keep coming back to most. I wonder how much life we miss while we’re busy trying to interpret it. An idea never gets past the first question because we can’t see what we would do with it. Something interests us, but it doesn’t fit neatly into the person we already believe ourselves to be. We stand at the beginning asking where something goes until eventually we just don’t go.

I don’t want to do that.

There’s too much I haven’t seen. People are walking around right now who I haven’t met. I will have ideas that are impossible for me to imagine today because I haven’t had them yet. Something I learn later could completely change the way I understand something I’m certain about now.

That doesn’t make the future something I need to solve. It makes me want to participate in getting there.

Think again about the person from the beginning. You didn’t know they were coming, and they came anyway. Your life reached a point you couldn’t see from where you had been standing before.

So what else haven’t you reached yet?

I have no idea.

And I like that question a whole lot more than I like trying to figure out exactly what everything is supposed to mean.

There’s Still More to Find Out

I want life to still have the ability to catch me off guard. I want to follow an idea farther than I expected simply because it stays interesting. I want to get somewhere someday and realize I never could have mapped the route from where I started.

That requires leaving some room for not knowing.

Curiosity can be enough reason to look closer. I want to see what happens can be enough reason to move. If I get there and something doesn’t feel right anymore, I’ll know something I didn’t know before. I can make another decision from there.

That’s not failing to find the path.

That is the path.

We live it. We respond to what happens. We change when something changes and keep going when something still feels right. Somewhere in there, all those little pieces start connecting into a story we’ll eventually be able to tell backward.

Right now, though, we’re still living the part we don’t understand yet.

There is more of your own life capable of surprising you. You don’t have to know what it is, and you certainly don’t have to figure out what it all means before you get there.

Just don’t stand still forever waiting for information that can only find you once you move.

You haven’t met all of you yet.

And I think that’s the fun part.

We’ve got some living to do.

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