The Deliberate Act of Not Knowing
“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” —Mary Oliver
On my daily walks with the pup, I name what I recognize—lemon, cherry, pine, oak. Lavender, jasmine, poppies, oranges. Daffodils, magnolias, lime, fruitless olive.
But then there are the others.
The nameless multitudes that line the streets in a thousand shades: greens so vivid they look unreal, yellows that sparkle with a light within, reds that pulsate with life. They press against sidewalks, spill over fences, hide in crevices—witnessed but unacknowledged.
I pause when the pup lingers, his nose twitching constantly, decoding mysteries, reading the scraps of stories left behind. I trace the symmetry of petals, the tight spirals of seed heads, the way veins interlace—measured, perfect, immaculate.
A spindly plant stretches outward from its center, sword-like leaves that sway in the breeze. A flowering bush bears magenta blooms with specks of cranberry hues holding, in their molecular arrangement, some fragment of cosmic order.
Each day, I name what I recognize—and walk past what I don’t
I don’t know what they are.
I don’t know if they are native to California or arrived in plastic nursery containers from Oregon like our hedge did. I can’t tell you if they will remain green through winter or wither into dormancy. I don’t know if they bloom or change color with the seasons. I don’t even know what to call them.
And the strange thing—the thing that perplexes and confounds me as I write this—is that I have no desire to look any of it up.
Last week, I wrote about my attempts to reclaim curiosity with my daughter—to Google things rather than letting questions dissolve into the background noise of daily life. Yet here I am, deliberately not pursuing knowledge that’s literally at my fingertips. My phone sits heavy in my pocket, a portal to infinite knowledge. A photo, a search, and in seconds I could attach names to these question marks. But I never do.
The contradiction isn’t lost on me
Each day, I pass by them, delight in them, even touch some, but never look them up. Why?
I tell myself it’s about preserving these walks as digital detox time. But I think the truth sits deeper. You could call it laziness but there’s something almost protective about this not-knowing. In a world that demands certainty, expertise, and immediate answers, these unnamed plants remain outside that economy of knowledge.
They exist in a relationship with me that isn’t mediated by facts or information—just pure, wordless recognition. And I’m reluctant to surrender that. That this extra fact— this plant’s Latin name, this mushroom’s toxicity, the reason Palo Alto’s fire hydrants are orange and Los Altos’s are yellow—will lodge itself in my brain with nowhere to go, no one to talk to, no moment in which it will become useful.
Or maybe I’m just afraid that if I start caring about knowing, I won’t be able to stop. That curiosity, once reawakened, will claw at me, demanding I pay attention to every overlooked detail, every unanswered question, every quiet thing that no one else seems to notice.
And then what?
Above me stretch other nameless things — clouds articulated against the blue. Cumulus? Cirrus? Cumulonimbus? Striated formations, streaked like a painter’s brush, those dense ones that resemble plowed earth before rain. I learned their taxonomies once, in window-lit classrooms with laminated charts.
Where did those facts go? What neural pathways, once well-traveled, now lie overgrown? Forgotten. Dormant. Maybe dead altogether?
In the midst of nameless things, above and below
There was a time when my mind was a storehouse of specifics. I knew how glacial valleys differed from ones carved by rivers, why moth caterpillars are distinct from butterflies, how much a whale weighs.
I had answers then. Now, I have only questions I don’t quite care enough to resolve.
Would those purple blossoms I pass each morning mean more if I could speak their name? Would the clouds hold greater significance if I could classify them? Would the hedge on the corner transform from background scenery to meaningful encounter if I understood its origins?
Would my conversations be richer? My presence in the world more anchored?
Or is there something sacred in this state of not-knowing? This quiet existence alongside things I can’t categorize, can’t explain, can’t tame with language?
Maybe there’s a kind of reverence in simply noticing. Maybe attention itself is enough.
And yet, I wonder if this is just an elegant excuse for inertia. If curiosity, left unfed for too long, withers into complacency. If the failure to seek reflects not philosophical surrender, but a slow drifting away from wonder, from the effort it takes to truly know something.
Because maybe knowing is more than just gathering facts. Maybe, like I mentioned in my essay last week, it’s a way of saying: I care that this exists.
I run my fingers along the hedge’s leaves by our neighbor’s driveway. In the five years they’ve had it, this is the first time I touch them. They’re smooth like they have a coating of wax. Their white flowers look like … I pause. A name rises, half-formed, from some forgotten recess of memory.
Is this...?
To name it would be to enter into relationship
The pup tugs, impatient. The moment flickers. I could reach for my phone and do a Google Reverse Image search. Or, I could just keep walking.
The choice is so small it almost doesn't matter.
But it does.
In a world where we’re drowning in information but starving for meaning, these tiny decisions accumulate. They form the basis of how we move through spaces, how we relate to what surrounds us, how we understand our place.
We’ve been taught that information equals power, that not knowing reflects some failure of curiosity or intelligence. Our phones promise to eliminate all uncertainty, offering instant expertise on any subject.
But what happens to our relationship with the world when everything is immediately knowable? When the space between question and answer collapses to seconds? Perhaps these small resistances—these chosen mysteries—are quiet rebellions against a culture that has commodified knowledge while devaluing the slow, embodied experience of coming to know something over time.
I look at the hedge again, really look at it. Not just its presence as a boundary between properties, but its particularity—the specific angle of its branches, the unique veining of its leaves, the way it’s rooted itself in this precise patch of earth.
To name it would be to acknowledge it as something specific, something with a history and lineage, something that exists beyond my passing glance. To name it would be to enter into relationship, just like with my dwarf umbrella tree.
And perhaps that’s the heart of it—this reluctance to commit to relationships with all the countless things that populate my days. Because relationships require attention. Require care. Require time. Require ongoing work.
Easier to drift past. Easier to remain in the comfortable fog of half-awareness. Easier to let the world wash over me without demanding I engage with its endless, exhausting specificity at all times and with everything.
The pup tugs again, harder now.
I let go of the leaf, let the moment pass, continue our walk through a neighborhood of half-recognized things, a landscape of almost-knowing.
Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll bring my curiosity back from wherever I’ve left it. Maybe I’ll look up the names of things, learn their stories, invite them into the circle of what I care about.
Or maybe I’ll just notice a little more carefully as we walk—the shape of things, the color, the texture. Maybe I’ll let them exist in the space between named and unknown, between intimate and strange.
Maybe that middle ground is enough.
Or maybe this balance is constantly shifting—some days leaning toward the hunger to name and know, other days toward the quiet acceptance of mystery. Perhaps the true practice isn’t choosing one approach forever, but noticing which way I’m leaning today, and understanding why.
Today, I leave the hedge unnamed. Tomorrow, who knows?
Is there something you walk past each day that you haven’t looked up? What might change if you did? Do you chase answers, or linger in the in-between? I’d love to hear from you. Just hit reply.
XOXO,
Mansi.
