9:00AM
“I dont know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I said this to myself repeatedly this morning after I hit snooze/changed the time on my alarm for the third time. I had dreams where many crazy things were happening and then I woke up and kept trying to interpret the dreams.
For example, in one dream, it had rained outside my childhood home in the suburbs of Detroit and it had rained so hard that I started to see things. I went outside and noticed there two very large fish jumping across the neighbor’s grass. Just skipping merrily through the swampy grass. I got so confused. Then I saw a few seals somehow emerge from the swampy grass. Mind you, the grass is normally only a few inches tall (or 2.54x in centimeters for my non-American friends). I saw a few other people and tried to ask them what was happening and they said they didn’t even see the seals or fish. Then, out of nowhere, a young gay man and his partner came up to me and started to ask about my house—whether I liked it, whether it had been good to me, and other questions I can’t remember. I just remember feeling really suspicious and awkward, not sure of their motivations, and then the conversation turned towards the partner’s career in mechanical engineering as I tried to slowly close the front door.
In another dream, I was back in Tanzania, or explaining it to someone, and was trying to remember the name of the rich neighborhood where I worked—I could remember the name of the Msasani peninsula, which was the overall area, but I couldn’t remember the name of the exact neighborhood—it was something that started with the letter k, I thought. After waking, and struggling and struggling, I realized that it was Masaki. Triumph!
I think I put so much pressure on myself to connect the dots, even when they may not be able to be connected. I read an article saying that we as humans have a complexity bias, that we prefer complex things to simple things and that when things are chaotically organized, we assume that there’s some underlying complexity to it, some underlying connection that flows from dot to dot. This same bias leads us to see conspiracies in otherwise chaotic situations, where there is no logical connection but we try to make it anyway.
I have a strong tendency to try to find these connections. And it sometimes drives me crazy. I remember a few years ago I wanted to start a gym called the IDK Leadership Gym. The reason? Because I thought being able to say “I don’t know” and accept the uncertainty of the world was one of the most important skills for a leader. This morning, I luckily remembered this practice and after repeating “I don’t know,” I felt so much better.
