We cannot live in an imagined future within our own mind. The future is real and it will reveal itself when it arrives. The future will defy our specific predictions and our general expectations.

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We cannot live in a remembered past within our own mind. The past was real and what it showed us when it was here can never be fully reclaimed. If we allow the past to speak it tells us scandalous and amazing things. Usually, though, we ask it leading questions and it obliges us, confirming what we suspect, flattering our conceit that now is fundamentally different: we know better now. But we have always known better now.

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We cannot know any particular entity just because we know about it in general. If we interact with the particulars of the world in new ways, paying scrupulous attention, striving to make coherent and general sense of what we perceive, these things will disclose truths to us that will force us to rethink everything we think we know. This process is unending, its content inexhaustibly volatile.

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We cannot know situations in general from what we have learned of the specific situations we have inhabited: those situation to which we are habituated. Only a minuscule slice of possible situations are habitable to beings like us, and within this range, the tiniest shift will throw us into shock. We love to hear the survivors’ stories, but these are exceptional.

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We cannot know another person by knowing about them. Each person is another instance of everything, containing anticipations, memories, understandings, and incommunicable experiences unlike our own, and person packs the power to teach us not only about realities, but to teach us into new relations with reality, which is to teach us out of old selves and into new ones. Be careful who you let teach you!

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And finally we cannot know ourselves, simply from having been ourselves so far. We are fragile, fallible, barely oriented, and packed with potential to learn, to transform and to live brand-new transfigured realities. Self-estrangement can throw a me into relief before a more enduring I. It is hard to want that.

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