I Wish I Could See
On the human ache to know — what's coming, what it all means, and whether knowing would change anything at all.
There’s a particular flavor of late-night thought that asks the unanswerable questions, knows they’re unanswerable, and asks them anyway. This poem is one of those.
I don’t think it’s looking for an answer. Sometimes the asking is the whole point.
I wish I could see what happens
But if I knew, would anything change?
Would me having known
Result in a different fate?
I wish I could know the truth
About what it all means
If we even have a purpose
And if we do, what could it possibly be?
Maybe the gift of not knowing is that we keep going. The not-knowing is what makes the moves matter. If we knew the ending, we’d start playing for the ending instead of the game.
So we don’t get to know. And we keep going anyway.
— JTC