The Unknown, Unknowns

Alpajña — on the grace of not knowing, and the roads we couldn't have planned

Every moment of this life, we are anticipating.

We anticipated yesterday. We are anticipating right now. We will anticipate tomorrow. And somewhere in this endless rehearsal of the future, we made a quiet, unconscious decision — that we are the ones in charge. That the weight of this life is ours to carry. That we are both the driver and the passenger of this strange, sacred journey.

But consider this for a moment.

If you had to travel 500 kilometres — through highways you’ve never seen, weather you cannot predict, roads that may or may not be under construction, would you rather drive yourself, or have a trusted, experienced driver take the wheel, at no cost to you?

I would choose the driver. Every time.

Not out of laziness. But out of knowing myself. I know that gripping the wheel for hours will drain something in me — not just energy, but presence. I will arrive at my destination already spent, already somewhere else in my mind. But if I surrender the wheel to someone who knows the road better than I do. I arrive whole. I arrive there. I could rest, I could think, I could simply be, and give my full attention to what actually matters when I get there.

Why is this so easy to understand on a highway and so terrifying to live?

Why do I insist on driving when the Divine has been offering to take the wheel since before I was born?

We carry anxieties that were never ours. We make plans that crumble. We build futures in our minds, only to watch life quietly laugh and reroute us — not to punish us, but to show us that the map we drew was never the full territory.

There is a Sanskrit word that holds a truth most of us are never told: Alpajña (Al-pug-yah).

It means — one of limited knowing. That is what we are, each one of us. We are beings of partial sight. We see a few episodes of a story and declare ourselves experts on the plot. We live through a handful of chapters and think we know how the book ends.

We build the entire architecture of our lives — our choices, our fears, our definitions of success and failure, on the narrow foundation of what we have been allowed to see.

And here is the thing no one talks about.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

I know this not as philosophy. I know this as lived experience. As seasons that made no sense from the inside — seasons of loss, of waiting, of watching everything I thought I knew quietly come apart. And only in hindsight, always in hindsight — did I see the shape of what was being made.

Something was being written that I was not the author of.

I could not have planned it. I could not have predicted it. And if I had been given the pen — I would have written something so much smaller.

That is the mercy of not knowing.

We hold onto a verse from Gurbani in our home — quietly, without performance, like a lifeline that was always there:

Jo Thudhh Bhaavai Saaee Bhalee Kaar
Thoo Sadhaa Salaamath Nirankaar

Whatever pleases You is the only good done, You, Eternal and Formless One.

~Japji Sahib, Guru Nanak Dev Ji

That is the only prayer that has ever fully made sense to me. Not — fix this. Not — give me what I want. But simply — whatever You will.

This is what I mean when I say — the Unknown is not your enemy.

Every rejection is a redirection. Every detour is the route.

I don’t have a large circle of friends. But I have found spiritual mentors, life mentors — people who have shown me how to see. And I have something I can only call a friendship with God. A companionship that lives beneath all the noise of this world.

And I have come to know this in my bones -

When God is all you have — you have all you need.

His Holiness Satguru Baba Hardev Singh Ji Maharaj once said something that has lived in me like a quiet flame -

“Life gets a meaning if lived for others.”

I have turned that sentence over in my hands a thousand times. In moments of confusion, in moments of loss, in moments where the road disappeared entirely and I stood there with nothing but the dark and whatever faith I had left.

And slowly, slowly — I understood.

The Unknown is not a void. It is not punishment. It is not chaos dressed as destiny.

It is an invitation.

An invitation to stop being the author of your own story and become something rarer — a witness to it. To watch, with wonder and without grasping, as something far greater than your plans quietly unfolds around you.

You were not meant to see the whole road. You were meant to walk it.

Step by step. Breath by breath. Held, even when you cannot feel the hands.

I don’t know what I don’t know. And for the first time — I am grateful for it.

The road ahead is not empty. It is not uncertain.

It is held.

And you — with all your questions, your grief, your longing, your beautiful limited sight —

you are held too.

~ Agrim | EternalWriter