The Unknown: Dread or Fascination?
Over the past fifteen years, I have gradually become better at viewing the unknown as a double-edged sword and accept it as such sooner rather than later when embarking on new ambitious ventures. But I admit that, plainly obvious as it may already be, I still need to remind myself that learning one skill well grants me no exemption from the work required in learning another skill and yet another, as needed with each new goal. Accepting this fact can be challenging. Zen masters refer to it as “the beginner’s mindset,” which to me now means an open mind undisturbed by unrealistic expectations. It’s the type of work that constantly awaits us in a twilight zone between the ‘musts’ and ‘wants’ of the day. How we approach the unknown or react to it over time determines our outcomes to any long-term endeavor we’ve deemed worthwhile pursuing. On one end, there is the fear of it, making us feel insecure or unconfident, while on the other end stands the fascination with it, as expressed through our curiosity or ambition to explore, discover, grow, stay tuned, and remain in the crazy game called life for as long as we can. We keep moving from one edge of this sword to the other throughout life and it’s up to us to decide to either linger more towards the edge of fear or the edge of fascination, or ultimately accept that a back-and-forth shift will happen as often as we choose to master a new skill of any kind.
People often tend to assume that a successful person is either lucky or at least smarter than the rest. Neither of these assumptions is necessarily true. Someone wise once said that luck favors the prepared. Once luck knocks on your door and you take the opportunity, your commitment to integrity, discipline, learning, and perseverance becomes more of a requirement than ever before, because if you allow complacency to settle back into your frame of mind, luck will promptly move away from you and on to knocking on other people’s doors. Luck is swift, so you’d be better off not relying on it too much.
As far as the being smart argument goes, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told that I am a “brilliant” this or a “brilliant” that, when, in sad reality, nothing can be further from the truth. I already said this in my very first blog post on this website (March 1, 2022), but I’ll nevertheless repeat it here for those who might have missed my point the first time around. I was twenty-four in 2000 when I set foot on US soil, and a very nice student at LSU helped me create my first email address without laughing at my ignorance. That was the second time I touched a computer. The first time was the year prior during my TOEFL exam in Bulgaria — an English test for foreign students required by many American universities, LSU included. As I had clearly been out of practice for a while, it may quite likely have seemed to that doctoral student back then that he was witnessing my first ever encounter with a computer. I must also give him credit for keeping a poker face upon learning that I had just arrived to the US to complete a master’s degree…
Were there no opportunities at hand to gain some computer literacy and become at least somewhat computer savvy while I was still living in Sofia? Of course, there were! Did I take advantage of such opportunities? No, I didn’t, because I thought that all I’d ever need in life was my violin and sheet music. Not brilliant! Rather, chronically and willfully behind on multiple factors that had already started to entirely reshape the lives and future of human beings!
So, with my so-called brilliance out of the way, I’ll tell you what made things work for me instead. It was the fear of poverty that hit me when I reached the age of thirty-two. I suddenly felt old and professionally inadequate. By then, the cognizance of my decades long intentional self-positioning near the fear edge of the unknown, with all its limitations and self-compromises, had finally sunk into my thick Balkan head. What I chose to make happen next made all the difference. My choice involved multiple ‘trips’ from the fear edge of the sword to the fascination edge and back. Took me several years (well, about five) to start appreciating the shortening of this ‘distance’ by my being able to spend longer periods of time on the fascination side rather than the fear side of the never-ending stainless-steel road called the Unknown. The double-edged sword of the unknown never rusts, because the more you know, the more and more you realize how much you really don’t know. I remember the taste of this realization upon earning my black belt in karate, graduating from nursing school, acquiring my first investment, and on multiple other occasions. The sword will not rust. Only we will if we keep clinging onto obsolete knowledge patterns and hiding under comfort umbrellas that prevent us from growing and expanding our horizons.
The unknown is a constant that gives us choices. We walk, run, or stand in one place. Some prefer to just sit there. Yet others fall asleep and remain that way for a long time. Hey, it’s comfortable and in many cases — convenient, right?
For many accomplished people, success has little to do with brilliance, which is highly subjective to begin with, and a lot to do with determination, character, discipline, or resilience. I don’t care how smart you may like to think you are; if you are lazy, inconsistent, distracted, disorganized, and unmotivated, you might as well be stupid — wouldn’t make the slightest difference.
More knowledge brings more choices, and with more choices come more responsibilities. It may become uncomfortable at times. The level of discomfort fluctuates, too, depending on your levels of integrity and accountability. It’s a tough realization finding out that you can be just as legitimate a coward by refusing to act upon the knowledge you’ve acquired as you were while stirring away from acquiring that knowledge in the first place. After all, life offers plenty of opportunities for being afraid and backing off as it does for showing courage and stepping up. It is a question of handling inconvenience now or having to put up with it later, that’s all.
My main mistake in my late twenties was that I let my fear of rejection and fear of failure in the face of the unknown guide my decisions instead of embracing the realization that certain risks and mistakes would be perfectly fine and an inevitable part of learning anything of major importance to my future. And I lived submerged in this mindset for the first eight years after coming to the US, trying hard to make it work. Part of it was, I profoundly distrusted my ability to effectively get away from the musician profession. The other part was that it took a long time to realize how valuable it would have been to at least give it a shot. It actually took two other fellow violinists who said "screw it" to their pursuit of music for a living for me to finally wake up and realize that I, too, needed to reshape my life, because those two had always been consistently more professionally successful than I was and they still found the courage to say, "screw this"!
Sometimes, people you least expect can influence your life in just one instant and propel you to make the crucial decision you rarely dared even contemplate. That very instant will be a hard test of your ability to cope with crude reality and require a great deal of focus and strong will to break through all the misconceptions about yourself that you’ve been holding onto for dear life. It will be some years before you recognize a feeling of immense gratitude to your (likely) unaware and unintentional ‘influencer(s)’ for rudely interrupting your deep sleep on that sobering, forever memorable day you learned through just as innocent a third party about their grit and determination to seize rather than shun the Unknown!