Leaving Room for Life to Surprise Us

A few days ago, I was listening to Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan talk, and a name kept coming up: Rick Rubin.

Of course, I knew the name. Rick Rubin is a legendary music producer. What I didn’t really know was him—or, more accurately, the way he thinks.

So I started reading and listening.

And down the rabbit hole I went.

What fascinated me wasn’t his extraordinary résumé or the famous people he has worked with. It was his openness. He seems genuinely interested in noticing things without immediately needing to explain them.

He talks about creativity as something much larger than making music or art—a way of paying attention to the world, remaining receptive, questioning what we assume to be true, and allowing an idea to reveal itself before deciding what it is supposed to become.

One idea particularly intrigued me: sometimes all of our knowledge and training can actually get in the way of creativity.

That sounds counterintuitive. Aren’t we supposed to learn as much as possible?

Of course.

But knowledge also gives us categories. Rules. Expectations. This is how this is done. This belongs here. I’ve seen this before. I know what comes next.

All of that knowledge can be enormously useful.

Until it prevents us from seeing something differently.

Sometimes creativity—and perhaps life itself—requires being willing to say:

What if I don’t know?

And that stopped me.

Because I am beginning to wonder if one of the great skills of living well is learning to become comfortable with uncertainty.

Maybe We Don’t Have to Explain Everything

I am a thinker.

Actually, that may be putting it mildly.

Give me a thought and I can examine it from twelve directions, take it apart, put it back together, question why I thought it in the first place, consider three alternate explanations, and then take it for a three-mile walk just to make sure we haven’t overlooked anything.

Sometimes this serves me beautifully.

Sometimes I suspect I am simply trying to make uncertainty surrender.

There are experiences in my life that I have desperately wanted to understand.

Why did someone do that?

Why did I allow this?

Why didn’t I see something sooner?

Was that feeling intuition? Fear? Hope?

Was something real, or did I make it real because I wanted it to be?

Surely, if I think about something long enough, there will eventually be an answer.

Except sometimes there isn’t.

And perhaps there doesn’t need to be.

That doesn’t mean ignoring our instincts or refusing to learn from our experiences. It means recognizing something I wish I had understood much earlier:

I can know what I feel without knowing exactly what it means yet.

And sometimes yet may eventually become ever.

There may be questions in life for which no satisfying explanation arrives.

Maybe peace doesn’t always come from finally finding the answer.

Maybe sometimes peace comes from realizing we can live beautifully without one.

What Do We Do With the Empty Space?

Human beings aren’t particularly fond of missing information.

Give our brains silence, ambiguity or an incomplete story, and we tend to start filling in the blanks.

Someone doesn’t respond.

They’re angry.

Someone becomes distant.

They don’t care.

Someone gives us unexpected attention.

This must mean something.

Something feels strange.

Something bad is going to happen.

Our minds are magnificent pattern-making machines. We take the information we have, combine it with everything we’ve experienced before, and try to predict what comes next.

That’s incredibly useful.

It can also get us into trouble.

Because once we’ve created an explanation, we can begin responding emotionally to our interpretation of reality as though it were reality itself.

And sometimes our behavior begins changing because of it.

We expect someone to reject us, so we become guarded. They sense our distance and pull back. Their withdrawal confirms our original belief.

See? I knew it.

The prophecy begins helping to fulfill itself.

Or perhaps we desperately want something to be true. We interpret ambiguous information optimistically, notice everything that supports our story, overlook what doesn’t, and begin behaving according to an explanation that hasn’t actually been established.

Our stories can become so convincing that we forget we wrote them.

Maybe wisdom isn’t learning to stop interpreting the world. I doubt we could.

Maybe it’s learning to separate three things:

This is what I know.

This is what I feel.

And this is the story my mind has created to connect the two.

Those are not always the same thing.

But Don’t Ignore the Gut

And here’s where it gets even more interesting.

I don’t believe the answer is to dismiss intuition.

Quite the opposite.

Our brains are constantly taking in information we aren’t consciously cataloguing—changes in expression, tone, patterns of behavior, inconsistencies, tiny details that don’t quite fit what we’ve previously experienced.

Sometimes the body seems to learn a lesson before we’ve found the words for it.

We’ve all had that feeling.

Something is off.

Or occasionally:

Something about this feels exactly right.

I don’t think we should automatically explain those feelings away.

But perhaps intuition and interpretation deserve a little breathing room between them.

There is an enormous difference between:

Something in me is telling me to pay attention.

and

Something in me is telling me I know the answer.

The first is awareness.

The second is a conclusion.

Maybe the healthiest response to intuition is:

I noticed that. I’m not going to dismiss it. But I’m also not going to invent an explanation for it. I’ll stay curious and wait for more information.

Honor the feeling without automatically believing the story you’ve attached to it.

I love that.

Information Isn’t the Same as Learning

Another part of the Huberman conversation stayed with me too.

Simply possessing information doesn’t necessarily change us.

We can read all the books. Listen to all the podcasts. Know exactly what we should do.

And then life happens.

Real learning often requires something more.

Sometimes we have to make the mistake.

Sometimes our prediction has to collide with reality.

Sometimes we have to discover that what we believed would happen isn’t what happened at all.

And those experiences can change us in ways information alone never could.

I used to think mistakes were primarily things to regret.

I’m beginning to think some of them are tuition.

That doesn’t mean we need to romanticize painful experiences or pretend we’re grateful for every person who has hurt us.

We can acknowledge our own choices and learn from them without assuming responsibility for someone else’s choices.

We can recognize that we missed something without deciding that makes us foolish.

We can learn to trust ourselves more without becoming suspicious of everyone else.

And perhaps we don’t always have to forgive everything on someone else’s timetable either.

There are experiences we may never completely understand and people whose actions we may never be able to reconcile with who we once believed them to be.

Maybe that’s okay too.

Maybe the final assignment isn’t always forgiveness.

Sometimes it may simply be:

I learned what I needed to learn here. I don’t need anything else from this story.

Remember the lesson.

Release the story.

A Lifetime of Waiting

Then I went to Atlanta and spent time with my granddaughter.

And somehow, while watching a two-year-old live completely inside her own little world, all these thoughts collided.

I realized that loving a child creates an entire lifetime of waiting.

Before they’re born:

I can’t wait to meet you.

Then:

I can’t wait until you smile.

I can’t wait until you crawl.

I can’t wait until you talk.

I can’t wait to hear what you think.

Then we wait for school and friendships and passions.

We wonder what they’ll love.

What they’ll be good at.

Who they’ll become.

Eventually there may be graduations, careers, falling in love, marriages, perhaps children of their own.

And suddenly you realize that loving someone creates an almost endless collection of things to look forward to.

What a lovely privilege.

And what a terrible shame it would be to spend so much time anticipating the next thing that we fail to notice the thing happening right now.

Because she isn’t waiting.

She’s two.

As far as she is concerned, this is it.

Her World Began With Her

That may have been my favorite thought of all.

For a young child, the world they inhabit essentially began when they did.

Of course, someday she will learn history. She’ll learn about wars and presidents and inventions and pandemics. She’ll hear family stories and learn about people who came before her.

She’ll eventually understand that Honey had an entire complicated life before she arrived.

But she won’t have lived in that world.

My past, which can feel enormously consequential to me, will largely be history to her.

And someday, when she’s 30, I doubt she’ll measure me by the chronology of everything that happened in my life.

Hopefully, she’ll remember what it felt like to be loved by me.

I will simply be Honey.

Someone fortunate enough to have been here to witness her world and her life.

There’s something wonderfully humbling about that.

We spend so much of adulthood worrying about the significance of our stories, and then a two-year-old reminds us that life keeps beginning again.

Witnesses, Not Authors

Maybe one of the greatest gifts we can give the people we love is allowing them to surprise us.

It’s natural to wonder who a child will become.

Will she be artistic? Athletic? Quiet? Outgoing? Academic? Adventurous? Will she stay close to home or wander all over the world?

But there is an important difference between:

I can’t wait to see who you become.

and

I have an idea of who I hope you’ll become.

One is wonder.

The other can quietly become expectation.

I want to leave room for wonder.

I want to witness her rather than author her.

And maybe we owe adults the same generosity.

Leave people enough room to reveal themselves.

Not who we desperately want them to be.

Not who we’re afraid they might be.

Not the character we’ve constructed from incomplete information.

Who they actually are.

And then believe what they consistently show us.

Waiting Without Wishing Today Away

Perhaps the goal isn’t to stop waiting.

Waiting is woven into being human.

We wait for babies and test results and vacations and opportunities.

We wait for grief to soften.

We wait for relationships to reveal themselves.

We wait for answers.

We wait to understand things we cannot yet understand.

We wait for chapters of life that haven’t been written.

Maybe the lesson is simply:

Wait without wishing today away.

Anticipate without demanding.

Hope without trying to control.

Love without needing to know how the story turns out.

Feel without immediately requiring an explanation.

Notice before deciding.

And leave some empty space for life to surprise you.

Which, oddly enough, brought me to love.

This Is Worth Sharing My Freedom For

I realized recently that I am profoundly grateful that I am comfortable enough with my own company to remain single.

That’s not because I don’t believe in romantic love.

Quite the opposite.

I believe in it enough that I don’t want a relationship merely for the sake of having one.

There is peace in knowing that.

I don’t need someone to complete my life. I don’t want to choose someone because being coupled feels safer than being alone. And I don’t want someone else to choose me because I’m comfortable, convenient or good enough.

If I share this life with someone, I want something much more deliberate.

I want two people who are perfectly capable of standing independently to look at one another and think:

This. This is worth sharing my freedom for.

Not surrendering it.

Sharing it.

And I’ve realized that being truly chosen doesn’t mean expecting another human being to stop noticing the rest of humanity.

Of course we’ll encounter attractive people.

Interesting people.

Magnetic people.

People whose appearance catches our eye or whose minds, humor, energy or presence intrigue us.

Commitment doesn’t make us blind.

Love doesn’t make us cease being human.

The meaningful part is what happens next.

When someone truly chooses the person they love, whatever thoughts, temptations, opportunities, frustrations or changes life brings, they protect what they’ve chosen together.

They don’t feed a fleeting attraction.

They don’t create secret little spaces where it can grow.

They don’t manufacture opportunities.

They don’t begin giving someone else pieces of intimacy that belong inside the relationship.

Not because another interesting person will never exist.

Not because temptation is impossible.

Because they have decided what matters more.

There is something profoundly romantic to me about that.

Not:

There will never be another interesting person in the world.

But:

There may be thousands, and still, I choose you.

Again and again.

Perhaps that’s what commitment really is.

Choosing Without Knowing

And once again, there is uncertainty hiding inside the whole thing.

We cannot know with absolute certainty what another person will think, feel or encounter over a lifetime.

We cannot guarantee that another person will never hurt us.

We cannot know who either of us will be twenty years from now.

We cannot control every attraction, opportunity, illness, loss, frustration, success or transformation waiting somewhere beyond today.

Commitment isn’t eliminating those uncertainties.

It’s deciding how we will behave when they arrive.

Maybe love isn’t certainty about the future.

Maybe it’s two people choosing to protect something precious while walking into an uncertain future together.

And perhaps that same principle applies to almost everything.

We cannot control who our children become.

We cannot guarantee their happiness.

We cannot prevent every heartbreak.

We cannot know which friendships will last, where we’ll live ten years from now, what work we’ll be doing, who will leave, who will arrive, or which completely unexpected experience will alter the direction of our lives.

We can only pay attention.

Remain curious.

Learn.

Choose carefully.

Protect what deserves protecting.

And resist the temptation to write tomorrow’s ending before tomorrow gets here.

Leave a Little Room

I started all of this simply wondering who Rick Rubin was.

I certainly didn’t expect that curiosity to send me wandering through thoughts about creativity, neuroscience, intuition, uncertainty, mistakes, my granddaughter, waiting, independence, fidelity and love.

But perhaps that’s rather fitting.

One idea arrived.

I noticed it.

And instead of deciding immediately where it was supposed to go, I followed it.

Maybe that’s the point.

Not every thought needs an immediate conclusion.

Not every feeling needs an explanation.

Not every question needs an answer.

Not every painful experience needs a perfectly tied bow called forgiveness.

Not every empty space needs to be filled.

And not every story needs to be carried forever simply because it once mattered enormously.

Attention is precious.

We get to decide where we place it.

So perhaps we can turn it toward the child discovering the world for the first time.

Toward the person we haven’t met yet.

Toward the people we already love.

Toward the places we haven’t seen.

Toward ideas we haven’t considered.

Toward ourselves.

Toward today.

Leave some things unfinished.

Leave some questions unanswered.

Leave people enough room to reveal themselves.

Leave children enough room to become themselves.

Leave yourself enough room to change your mind.

And leave just enough empty space in the story for life to surprise you.

Remember the lesson.

Release the story.

Perhaps we don’t always need to know what happens next.

Perhaps we just need to be here when it does.

🍯 Honey Note

You can carry the lesson without carrying every detail of the story. Leave a little room for people to reveal themselves, for you to change your mind, and for life to surprise you.

And remember, someone else’s secrets do not require you to make your own story smaller. You are allowed to honor what you have lived, release what no longer deserves your attention, and keep moving toward whatever brings you peace and joy.

Live your life fully, truthfully, and with the curtains open.

With an open heart and a curious mind,

Honey 🍯