Do I want to know?
Not knowing is another form of torture
Ale Meza-Santiago
If you compromise with your own conscience, you weaken it.
Napoleon Hill
We’ve all faced the question … do I want to know?
When you’re paused on the brink of information that might change your view of someone or potentially hurt, you wonder, is ignorance bliss?
It feels like being given the option to wound yourself or not.
Sometimes we choose to only see part of the truth – the part that suits us. We think that if we keep the rest of the truth out of sight, it’s out of mind.
We create a philosophical bubble around our happiness. It’s our own little world where certain truths apply.
It’s so beautiful, so magical here. Why would we care about the rest? Why should we?
But… it catches up with you.
Unacknowledged truth is like Poe’s telltale heart.
Ok, there are legitimately some things you don’t need to know. You don’t want to read someone’s diary – their raw emotion doesn’t represent how they feel about you overall. You don’t need to know the details of ex lovers. You don’t need to participate in gossip – it’s a tarted up half-truth at best.
Yet, sometimes you know you’re falsely turning a blind eye. If you’re not living with integrity, it hurts your heart, especially if you start filling in the blanks with shifting shapes and monsters.
Not knowing becomes another form of torture.
Tear up the planks! here, here! –It is the beating of his hideous heart!
If you find yourself paused at that precipice of knowing … caressing the fruit of good and evil with your fingertips … if you find yourself asking ‘do I want to know?’ maybe the answer lies in this question instead.
Are you better off not knowing… or is it just that knowing might force you to make a decision you don’t want to make?
Muchness 
My thought is that you are better off knowing – the detail is in how you find out.
Of course I would never condone reading the diary of another (even when invited it just doesn’t feel right) but it comes down to being able to make a reasonable decision about what affects your life and what the consequences may be.
The things that come to my mind is: If you felt that you were on the verge of falling head-over-heels for someone (using the example of after the event with 20-20 hindsight), would you want to be with that special someone if they had a history of cruelty to animals; had been involved in the kind of riots a couple of years back in London where innocent bystanders were kicked and robbed – and were there to fight rather than protest; secretly showed affinity to neo-nazis, Islamic Jihad or the KKK?
How about if that person had an extraordinary history of good to society but preferred to keep it quiet? Could that make you gravitate more towards them while ignoring the snoring or farting? 🙂
I think – using my opinion of you – that you *would* want to know because the option is that it may change somewhere down the track. The example I used is the old adage of “No matter how good a woman looks; how well she may be stacked; how good she is in bed; how much beer she buys you, etc etc – there is always someone, somwhere who is sick of her shit.”
Do you want to become sick of it over time or go in with your eyes open? 🙂
I would suggest that witch hunting someone’s flaws is counter productive. It’s better to get to know people over time. No-one is perfect and everyone has shit that stinks but that doesn’t mean they’re not also amazing, worthy people. Your love for them expands to cover all of it.
Your opinion of me is on the money. I did land on wanting to know – but not so I could furnish myself with a reason to run away or consider myself fairly warned in future once I’m sick of it. I just don’t think it’s right to embrace only part of a person. I don’t want to select with my shopping trolley just this bit or that bit of someone and so that’s the only face they can ever show me for risk of upsetting me.
If I choose to face the world boldly and love it – the same should also be true of people.