Embracing Confusion

I was musing about writing an article, and the following concluding sentence came to me:

“And so, with hard work and confusion, we can become our best selves.”

Many people would agree with the value of hard work — but why “confusion”? Is there a way in which confusion should also be thought of as a value to be embraced?

Maybe there is.

It is in the nature of the world that we do not necessarily know what we are doing with our lives, especially when it comes to the big picture. As I write this article in 2020, it is the rare person indeed who saw where they would be five (5) years from now back in 2015. To a large extent, we do not have the luxury of waiting to figure out what we are going to do with our lives. We just have to muddle through. In this sense, maybe it might make sense to embrace the confusion and live out our lives as best we can despite our lack of understanding.

Maybe we should just accept that only God really understands the path of our development and trust in God.

That is not to say that we should not try to make sense of things. I believe rationality is a God-given gift. But, even as we figure some things out, new challenges to our understanding will appear.

So, maybe my thought was true. Maybe it is through the embrace of both hard work and confusion that we achieve our best selves.