Are we nearly there yet?

“Are we nearly there yet?”

That childhood question that could test a grown-up’s patience to the limit. Usually followed by, “How much longer?” or “Is it much further?” and, not long after, perhaps the slightly exasperated, “I don’t know!”

I was reminded of this recently while thinking about what happens when we genuinely don’t know something.

Not the sort of I don’t know where we actually have a pretty good idea but don’t want to say. A real I don’t know.

We can be surprisingly impatient with those moments. We want to know what to do next, what the answer is, whether we’re making the right decision, what is going to happen, where all of this is heading.

So we start hassling our own I don’t know. We turn it over, analyse it, ask ourselves the same question in slightly different ways and look for certainty.

Perhaps, in our own way, we’re asking:

“Are we nearly there yet?”

But what if I don’t know isn’t a problem to solve?

What if it is simply where we are right now?

There may still be somewhere we want to get to. We can still have a decision to make, something we want to understand, or a direction we’d like to find. We don’t have to stop caring about the destination just because we don’t know exactly how we’re going to get there.

We might just stop hassling ourselves about how quickly we get there.

Because when we’re not constantly demanding an answer from ourselves, there can be space to notice what is actually unfolding. A thought we hadn’t considered might occur to us. Something that seemed complicated might become clearer. We might suddenly see something that was right under our nose.

Or perhaps we simply find ourselves knowing what to do when, a little earlier, we had no idea.

The journey hasn’t necessarily become shorter. We’ve just stopped making it harder work than it needs to be.

And maybe that’s the grown-up version of Are we nearly there yet?

Not pretending we don’t want to arrive.

Just discovering that we can travel there with a little more ease.

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