I Don't Know...Anything About Mother Teresa
The importance of saying "I don't know"
As much as we like to think we know, familiarity does not equal understanding, nor does recollection equal knowledge.
You would think that saying “I don’t know” would be a regular and straightforward thing for most of us, in a world where things are changing around us constantly.
Despite that, I’ve personally realised that it isn’t uncommon for me to catch myself trying to answer questions I don’t really have an answer to. When something comes up that I have a small amount of familiarity or recollection of, perhaps I think I sound more intelligent by reeling off what I can from my memory, as opposed to giving the honest answer of “I don’t know”.
In some scenarios, it is obvious why we wouldn’t want to say it too often. At work, saying it over and over could make you seem or feel incompetent. But this shouldn’t apply to other aspects of life.
In a recent conversation with my partner, we somehow stumbled on to the topic of Mother Teresa, and the question of what she did. Given my total lack of knowledge about what Mother Teresa actually did, my answer should have been a pretty emphatic “I don’t know”. But, because I held some familiarity with her name, I tried to answer the question with some surface-level recall.
“Oh yeah, she was a nun right, helped loads of people… in India…?”
Now, this is a mundane example and the conversation and our days moved on without any pause. But this wasn’t a one-off, and as soon as I realised I didn’t know the answer but tried to tackle the question anyway, I was struck, wondering how often this happened and what the compounding impact of doing this time and again would be.
By rejecting the idea of saying “I don’t know”, what do we miss out on?
The visualisation above made it much easier for me to realise that the answer is in fact a range of unknown possibilities. By listening to, realising, and then exploring what we don’t know, a whole world of learning and discovery could be uncovered, which would be totally closed off by trying to cobble together an uninformed answer.
This premise is the basic idea behind writing under the title of “What I Don’t Know”. It is a space to explore deeper the things that I realise I don’t understand - to uncover, explore and harness curiosity.
“I don’t know” has always felt like a problem statement. This is an attempt to change that and turn it into a springboard for curiosity and opportunity.
So, what about Mother Teresa?
Well, even diving a little bit deeper on to this “mundane” topic ended up being pretty thought provoking.
On the surface, there is probably a strong case to make for her literally being the best person to ever live. She was hugely decorated, recognising her generosity was the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, honorary US citizenship in 1996 (one of only 8) and being made a Saint by The Pope after her death in 1997.
The amount of people she helped resulted in her being nicknamed the Florence Nightingale of the 20th century. She was also clearly incredibly wise, with many powerful quotes attributed to her, my favourite being:
“The best way to succeed in life is to act on the advice we give to others.”
But dig a little deeper and it seems there could be more than meets the eye. The two highest viewed videos on YouTube talk about “The Ugly Truth” or the “Dark Side” of Mother Teresa. Accusations laid at her include dubious ways of looking after the sick, questionable political contacts and suspicious management of the enormous amounts of money that she received.
Are these allegations true? Or are attacks on her simply atheists looking to score points against a famous religious figure? Does this mean that whatever you do in life, some people will demonise you for it regardless?
The truth is, I don’t know… and that’s exactly the right answer.