Reclaiming my ability to know
In a post-truth era. Finding the right questions. Unfurling within a void. Arriving somewhere new.
Happy new year to you! My first newsletter of 2025.. it’s nice to be back.
As I slowly shake off wanting to just keep hibernating (anyone else?), I’m putting pen to paper about an unfurling happening within me related to “knowing.” Specifically as it relates to the world.
In this day and age of information overload and political shake up and polarization and rapid change, my ability to know has been going through a heap of changes. From headstrong activist to complexity-oriented systems thinker to depolarized collective healing practitioner, I’m now arriving somewhere new in my spiral that’s asking me to sharpen my sword.
Below I share reflections on things like:
Epoché (ἐποχή) or “suspension of judgment”— a philosophical principle that blew my young mind and has shaped my path.
My sense of knowing being softened and expanded over the last 15 years by real world experience, a systems lens, and feeling moved to help depolarize things.
How my current way of knowing is up for evaluation; no longer of service in some ways; showing me edges that are ready to evolve.
The questions I’m using to help my evolution; to guide the unfurling happening for me within this feeling of being in a void.
I’m curious if your way of knowing—within yourself, in practice with others—has also been evolving?
With love,
Liz
Feeling myself in a void
There are some things that I can know—that are possible to know—about the state of the world and the times we live in.
This sense of ‘knowing,’ specifically as it relates to the world, feels foreign to me. As if this post-truth, complexity-oriented era has stripped me of thinking it’s even possible—or wise to strive for!—leaving me in a void.
But there’s something unfurling within me that’s nudging me to reclaim my ability to know. Reclaim parts of it, at least. That in this complex, multifaceted world filled with a never-ending sea of perspectives, there are things I can hang my hat on, and there are ways of going about ‘knowing’ that can be spiritually aligned.
There’s a new version of all of this developing within me, and I don’t know what it looks or even feels like yet. But it’s there, and is taking my down memory lane to reflect on where it’s been.
Suspending my sense of judgment
Epoché (ἐποχή) or “suspension of judgment.”
Pyrrho of Elis (l. c. 360 to c. 270 BCE) was a Greek skeptic philosopher who advocated for his students to cultivate epoché, or the ability to suspend their judgment. He believed that by withholding judgment on whether things are inherently good, bad, or indifferent, one could attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia).
“One must resist making judgments or stating conclusions because sense perception [does] not correlate to reality.” He argued, since certainty is impossible, then suspending judgment is the most rational way to navigate life’s uncertainties.
Wow, what a light bulb moment learning about this was! I have a distinct memory of that day in my college philosophy class. I felt a whole new way of being take place within me. One I didn’t even know was an option.
Suspend my judgment? You mean I don’t need to come down on one side or the other?? I can live somewhere in middle? Actually float my mind in between? Wow…
In a world that's loud and opinionated, aggressive and ruthlessly judgmental—and as someone who is naturally fire-y and comes from a personal life filled with people to match—this principle set me on a path to prove to myself that I could be otherwise. That black-and-white thinking and stances that require me to dig my heels in and not budge are naive, and that I could teach myself to refrain from making such rigid judgments and move about the world from a place of greater tranquility.
Seeing the bigger picture & coming down to earth
You see, this light bulb moment came at the height of my most fire-y activist phase. This phase—which I bow to within myself, as she’s the seed that has led to my life path—was filled with the kind of assuredness and righteous anger that only comes from fresh, young eyes. The kind of eyes that recently woke up to a problem, and think they see it clearly, therefore have all the answers.
Ah, that assuredness and righteousness. How I long for you at times these days… But I digress! (Or maybe am right on cue?)
Because the energy around this type of knowing—this phase of knowing in my life—set me on a path of sustainable development. It pushed me to channel what I knew into action and to become a practitioner. To get my hands dirty and really go out there and shift the structures that be towards systemic change. The type of systemic change I knew the world needed.
*Record scratch*
And then I got into the field.
And far from it being a place that confirmed and reaffirmed all of my ideas—although, some still stuck—it challenged those ideas. It brought them down to Earth and showed me how difficult it is to turn them into reality. The slow nature of bureaucracy, working in teams, operations, funding, red tape.
Not only that, but I was being trained to be a systems practitioner, meaning to work on a given issue—such as food insecurity or youth unemployment—from a whole-systems approach. To understand the root causes and larger systemic tree that the issue exists within; and then trial and error what acupuncture point might lead to some sort of change. It brought me face-to-face with the entrenched nature of so many of these problems, and the inevitable downstream effects that any sort of solution brings.
Needless to say, I was humbled, and my approach to knowing was humbled too.
Softening in the name of connection
So here I am, feeling humbled yet more grounded in my way of knowing. Yes, I’m less starkly righteous compared to my activist days, but I now have an evidence-based lens to lean on that makes me feel strong, and I still have a clear view about the world and what it needs.
And then came the Trump years.
The beginning of this chapter (that we are most certainly still in) continued to push my way of knowing to change, both personally, but especially socially.
The amount of disinformation flooding the zone, and the high degree of fragmentation that was happening across society was shocking. The tools I had to do something about it—cite reputable articles, have civilized conversations—weren’t working. My way of knowing in practice needed to change, which led me deeper down a path of Pyrrho’s epoché.
The social project of depolarization has been top of mind for me in recent years. The disease of disconnection (as a friend put it) is a root cause of so much that I care about, and a lot of the behavior I saw from my political circles seemed to exacerbate that. It’s brought me to a place within myself that says, yes we need to fight for what we care about, but the way we go about doing that matters just as much. Therefore I’ve been committed to making sure that my way of knowing, and how that translates into my politics, doesn’t feed into polarization.
This has led me to build on my whole-systems training to take an even greater zoomed out view on things and look at it from multiple perspectives. To try to understand each person's experience from a place of sincere curiosity, and move from a place that sees it as having value within the bigger picture. To source from the Ancient Indian myth of the blind men trying to make sense of an elephant. Each one at a different part, therefore reporting back different things, all of value.
My current approach’s growth edges
All of these shifts, and the evolution of my way of knowing that has come with them, have been purposeful. I feel proud of what I’ve cultivated and hold these principles that I’ve come to practice dearly.
But as things keep changing collectively, and I as a conduit for this change continue to evolve, something new is emerging for me, specifically related to knowing.
There are edges I’m up against; ways that this current make up isn’t of service to me. To parts of me, anyways:
There are parts of me that have become smaller, quieter, almost invisible within all of this. Expanding myself to make room for multiple view points has required me to step outside of it all and marginalize my unique take. There are two different exercises here—seeing from a bigger lens vs. honing in on my take—that both require their own space.
There’s a way that this process of knowing so many views nullifies having a view; as if it makes me disappear. A current event happens, for instance, and it’s as if the process of looking at it from all different angles cancels each direction out. It leaves me in that state of epoché but not in a way that brings peace.
There are ways that I’m scared that I don’t like. Scared that if I put my foot down in one direction or the other that I’ll be wrong, or blind, or misguided. Or worse, I’ll be harmful.
Then there are ways within this that have made me less clear about who I am politically, where I fall within the landscape, and therefore how to be, where to go, who to align with.
Questions to help guide me in the dark
Having a less sharply defined political sense doesn’t feel like an inherently bad thing. It feels like a product of the times. Allowing myself to be shaped by what’s happening, including by saying yes to the disintegration of things within myself and opening up to something new.
And perhaps that’s a good way to think about where I’m at right now. That after many years of softening and expanding—moving from the headstrong activist to the complexity-oriented collective healing practitioner—I’m now arriving at a point in my spiral that’s asking me to sharpen my sword. To integrate all of the wisdom and principles that life has been asking me to practice, and come out on the other side with new pointed ways of knowing, and therefore being, that pull from the best each phase has to offer.
At this moment, I don't know what that will look like, or what it is, or even how it will feel. I'm currently in that void—not a void of nothingness or deep space, but an earthbound void that has some texture to it, a certain quality of unfurling.
Therefore I’m inviting myself to come up with questions I can use to support this unfurling. Here’s what I got so far:
Black and white thinking is a no. But pure relativism is also not true. How does it feel to try to identify things—especially culturally—that hold truth for me? What things align with my values in a way that make them worth standing up for or putting my weight behind? And how does that reflect or connect to my vision of the world at this time and where I think it should go?
When I form an opinion about the world, what do I want it to be and what do I want it not to be? Perhaps the latter is easier. For instance, I don’t want it to be a rash judgment or informed by very little data points. I do want it to be.. well-informed and decently baked.
Are there smaller scale opportunities in my life I can start with? For instance, (me now talking to myself) I know that you are committed to practicing compassion and spiritual love for all, but you also have a healthy practice of boundaries, which requires forming an opinion or knowing something to do so. Notice what it’s like to do this—know something and then advocate for it—in those micro experiences. What can you apply elsewhere?
How can I balance putting my neck out there while also staying flexible and open to changing my mind? What emotionally comes up for me around this? What are my biggest fears here and how can I help them feel more secure?