I don't know

Boredom = fate worse than death. Being too ambitious is a bit boring.

Sometimes, insecure practitioners can decide to weaponise their expertise, and its implication of ‘design authority’, against other people involved in their projects, or their professional lives. Anyone who has been through architecture school has seen this phenomenon, and sometimes it can sneak out of the academy and into the studio.

That’s not great when that happens, contrary to creativity, team harmony and positive production. 

Interestingly, and very reassuringly, I have rarely seen it in twenty years of design journalism, a milieu where one might expect to run into the odd inflated ego. Not really so.

I have interviewed more than 150 architects, interior designers, product designers and even the odd ceramicist or craftsperson since 2001. In that time I have met very few toxically ambitious, egotistical or self-deluded people at the peak of the profession. Actually, the term ‘peak’ is misleading, because it suggests a sharp, singular point, occupied by the few. I define the peak as a broad, encompassing, multitudinous place, occupied by many and varied people and teams who are actually, and generally quietly, getting on with the business of creating accomplished, good works.

That is the good stuff: it really is an optimistic and encouraging observation, one that I have never really been conscious of until just now.

I wish to talk about something equally appealing to me, and hopefully, to you. 

I wish to talk about desire.

We can desire a lot of things, and desire can be good or bad. It’s pretty contextual, and it’s a really big topic. 

So let’s narrow our scope. 

Specifically, I want to name and speak about the aching desire for an accepting, settled state of what might be called Not Knowing: of a happy, restful ignorance that is delightful anathema to the ambitious professional. This desire is itself quite desirable, if only for its ability to de-weaponise and disarm the knowledge of the over-entitled, over-valued, protected ‘expert’.

To say to oneself, and to thoroughly accept the statement, ‘I do not know’, is fundamentally liberating.

With the guidance of meditation teacher Jeff Warren, who publishes guided meditations on calm.com, I have been exploring a meditation practice around the cultivation of what can be called ‘Don’t Know Mind’. This is apparently a Zen concept (although that might need to be fact-checked, I am not an authority on Zen.) This practice is where one responds to emerging feelings, thoughts, emotions and urges to control outcomes and devise endless strategies - anything, really - with the repeated, simple, internally-voiced statement: 

‘I don’t know. I don’t need to know’. 

If you can stick with it, calmly accepting whatever messy, distracted or flawed state of mind one experiences while you do the meditation, it can be a fantastic, settling experience. 

Equanimity and acceptance are both a big part of meditation. In the interests of using meditation to improve one’s life it is always good to draw these elements ‘off the cushion’, as they say, and into everyday life. I am not very good at this yet.

So perhaps I will stop there, go peer at a cloud, and breathe in and out deeply for a bit. 

Sounds like a plan.