Is Ignorance Really Bliss?
The beautiful soul who is poet Maggie Smith recently wrote about “hanging in there”—about how so many of us are toggling between hope and despair. I’ve been dancing between the two for a year now, since the moment I told my husband last March that I wanted a divorce. I thought that would be the worst thing that happened for a while, but I was wrong. A year of relentless battering culminated in the death of my beloved mother.
I would ask, “How much worse can it get?” but I’m afraid to, because the universe seems to have plenty of bad to spare.
Yet lately, I’ve been struck by the ease with which some people seem to move through the world—blissfully unaware or willfully ignorant. They don’t seem burdened by the weight of awareness, the need to heal, fix, or grow. They glide forward, untouched. Those who don’t worry about climate change. Those who slip seamlessly into their next relationship without tormenting themselves over what went wrong. Those who seem unbothered by the slow collapse of democracy or the increasing frequency of disasters, political and natural alike.
Ignorance is bliss, they say.
Then why can’t I be ignorant? Are ignorant people happier? Am I doomed to be elevated to this higher level of awareness and thus, unhappy forever?
And then I remember what Gay and Katie Hendricks said at a writing retreat I attended last October:
Writing is something you do for yourself but also for the larger conscious community.
You never know the magic that will be unleashed by your writing.
If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.
That last line rings in my ears because I know it to be true. I lived in that space—holding back what was within me, being slowly destroyed by it. And, of course, with a little help from those who saw my inner torment and used it to keep me stuck in that dark space.
But I got unstuck.
And so can you.
You are here because you are part of that larger conscious community. You are reading this because you, too, feel the pull of awareness and the weight of knowing. You, too, have probably wished to turn it off, to just “move on” without feeling the burden of reckoning. You, too, have wondered if ignorance really is bliss.
The truth? It might be, but only for a while.
Ignoring something doesn’t make it go away. It only lengthens the time of pain.
It takes courage to be conscious. It takes strength to acknowledge what is wrong and stand in the discomfort of truth. It takes the bravest version of ourselves to walk away from toxic environments, even when the alternative is terrifying. It takes resilience to fight the psyche’s tendency to cling to what’s familiar, even when that familiarity is painful. But if we can walk through the fire, we come out the other side burned but better. Renewed. Stronger.
Only when we are conscious can we make informed decisions, can we heal from the things that have held us back.
So, while we may find ourselves surrounded by people who choose the easy path—those who pretend everything is fine, who refuse to engage with the hard realities of their lives or the world—we know that ignorance is not an option for us. We cannot “turn off” our gift of higher consciousness and introspection. And though avoidance may bring temporary relief, it also keeps us stuck.
What we can do, however, is choose how to respond. We can acknowledge what’s happening and then decide, deliberately, where to put our energy. We can recognize that we have options.
And that is where our power lies.
Because while awareness may bring pain, it is also the only true path to freedom.
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