Questions that open doors #3: What if you didn't have to understand everything to move forward?

Newsletter created by Erika Marchioro

There are stories that end, and stories that instead keep living inside us in the form of a question.

Why did it happen? Why did they say exactly that to me? Did they really love me? Could I have done something different? What if I had stayed silent that time? What if I had understood sooner?

We keep returning to the same point, convinced that somewhere there's a detail we haven't yet considered. A word to interpret differently. A forgotten memory. An explanation finally capable of putting everything in its place.

It's our way of searching for a conclusion. Because the unresolved weighs on us. And some questions seem to promise us something wonderful: if you find the right answer, you'll finally feel okay.

But that's not always what happens. Sometimes we find an answer and immediately another one is born. What if instead...?

And here we are again.

When understanding becomes a way of not letting go

Searching for meaning isn't wrong. We need to build a coherent story of what happened to us. Especially when we've been through a loss, an abandonment, a painful relationship, or something that abruptly interrupted the course of our life.

The problem arises when we ask understanding for something it cannot give us: absolute certainty.

We cannot enter the mind of someone who is no longer here. We cannot know exactly what someone was thinking when they said a certain sentence. We cannot perfectly reconstruct a distant day. We cannot know how our life would have gone if we had made a different choice.

And yet we can spend years standing in front of those closed doors, still trying keys. Perhaps because accepting not knowing seems far more frightening.

There are guilts born from hindsight

There's also a particularly painful form of searching: the one we do when we have something to reproach ourselves for. A cruel word. A slammed door. A moment when we didn't understand. A person we hurt.

We look at that past version of ourselves with everything we know today and expect that back then they knew how to behave the way we know how to behave now.

But that person didn't have today's information. They had their own age, their own wounds, their own exhaustion, their own anger, and the tools they possessed in that moment.

This doesn't mean erasing responsibility. We can say: "I made a mistake."

We can say: "I wish I hadn't done it."

We can even acknowledge: "I hurt someone I loved."

Without necessarily adding: "And so I must keep punishing myself."

Remorse can teach us something. Perpetual condemnation cannot.

Even good people can be hurt

Perhaps one of the hardest things to accept is that behaving well doesn't guarantee that others will do the same.

We can hand someone our vulnerability, implicitly thinking: now that you know how much this hurts me, you won't strike me there.

And yet it can happen. Someone can use exactly that knowledge during an argument. They can say exactly the sentence we would never have said. They can attribute intentions to us that we never had. They can turn one of our wounds into a weapon.

And so we desperately search for an explanation: What did I do to provoke it? Why exactly there? What didn't I understand?

Perhaps, sometimes, the question that truly opens a door is another one: What if not everything that was done to me says something about me?

People also act through their own history. They project. They interpret. They defend themselves. They get angry. They attribute to others needs that perhaps belong to themselves. And sometimes they deliberately choose to hurt.

Understanding this doesn't mean justifying it. It means no longer necessarily searching within ourselves for the explanation of every behavior of others.

Perhaps closure doesn't mean knowing

We have a strange idea of closure. We think that one day an answer will arrive and we'll finally hear the sound of the door closing.

But some stories don't grant us that privilege.

Perhaps closure means arriving at the point of saying: "I've searched enough."

I haven't understood everything. It doesn't stop hurting. I haven't forgiven everyone. Simply: I've searched enough.

There will be things I'll never know. There will be words I wish I hadn't said. People from whom I wish I had received an explanation. Questions no one will ever be able to answer.

And yet my life continues on the other side.

The question that opens the door

Perhaps then today's question isn't: "How do I finally manage to understand everything that happened?"

It's: "What would happen if I stopped considering the complete understanding of my past a necessary condition for living my future?"

Perhaps nothing spectacular would happen. Perhaps, simply, we would have a bit more space.

To work without a sentence spoken years ago occupying the whole morning. To love someone without asking them to repair all the previous absences. To build a family without thinking it has to resemble the one we wished we'd had. To remember those we've lost without turning every memory into an investigation. To be happy without immediately feeling the need to explain why we deserve it.

Perhaps lightness doesn't arrive when we've finally answered all the questions. Perhaps it arrives when we discover that some we can leave unanswered — and still keep walking.

And so the door was never closed. It was we who kept holding it open, looking back.