Sometimes I’m reminded of the pain of my past. When I couldn’t accept the truth that I had absolutely no clue. When I had an answer to every question, just babbled about most of the time to distract from the shame and guilt I felt for some of my actions that I had performed in total ignorance.

Ignorance is not something you do actively. When you decide to ignore something actively you are doing the opposite. You keep your attention on something you apparently don’t want to pay attention to. So you have to go one step further. Find something to distract your attention. This something needs to be charged with enough meaning and magnetism for you to keep your attention concentrated on it. But on a subtle level you are still “ignoring” that thing that causes you pain in the first place. That thing, that thought, that feeling, that you just want… to ignore. It’s like keeping distance, but not letting go. Keeping it further away than not knowing it.

Here is the thing about actual ignorance. You don’t know that you don’t know. Ignorance is not something you can just drop. It’s more like the not knowing gets replaced by knowing. Ignorance is the absence of knowledge of the absence of knowledge. Then… suddenly it dawns on you. And you thought you had it all figured out. You thought you had arrived at a fixed point of truth. A beautiful island where you’re absolutely right. But figuring out is always of the past. The data is not of present tense. It is always biased.

The level of bias is depending on the ignorance that you can do nothing about. Cognitive dissonance. But as experience goes on, and you become more conscious of entanglements that had built the foundation of all your past decisions all you can do is accept it. Accept that you didn’t know better and that you did your best.

And if you look back and you see clearly that this is not the very best anymore, that from now on you want to think and act in a different way because somehow you found understanding and compassion –with yourself–, you have simply arisen from that ignorance and replaced it. That one particular ignorance. Knowing of a better way has emerged. Probably.