We live in a marketplace of certainty
where everyone is selling answers
and no one admits
to being lost.
Opinions hang from every window,
bright banners snapping in the wind.
Truth is cut into convenient pieces,
wrapped in outrage,
and offered to the highest bidder.
We have learned to speak quickly,
to judge before listening,
to mistake a sharpened tongue
for an awakened mind.
We praise the person
who can dismantle every hope
but cannot build a single shelter.
We applaud those who stand
at the edge of the darkness,
carefully explaining
why lighting a candle
would accomplish nothing.
Doubt once walked beside wisdom,
asking honest questions,
testing every bridge
before trusting it
to carry our weight.
Now it sits upon a throne,
dressed in the robes of knowledge,
declaring every bridge unsafe
and every destination a lie.
Its followers wander in circles,
proud of never being deceived,
never noticing
they are also never arriving.
Meanwhile, the world waits.
The hungry still need bread.
The lonely still need company.
The wounded still need hands
that do more than point
toward the wound.
Perhaps we do not need
another clever explanation
of why humanity will fail.
Perhaps we need the courage
to believe that understanding
is still possible.
Not the blind belief
that closes its eyes to suffering,
but the tested faith
that looks directly at what is broken
and refuses to abandon it.
Let us question what demands obedience.
Let us doubt the voices
that profit from our fear.
But let us also question despair
when it claims to be wisdom.
Let us doubt the darkness
when it insists
there has never been a dawn.
The mind was not made
only to tear the world apart.
It was also made to imagine,
to forgive,
to recognize itself in a stranger,
and to find a path
where none had existed before.
So leave one door open.
Let wonder enter without credentials.
Let kindness speak
without first proving its intelligence.
And when the age asks
what we believed in
while everything trembled,
let us say:
We believed in questions
that led us toward one another.
We believed that wisdom
was more than knowing what to reject.
We believed that even in uncertainty,
there were still reasons
to remain human.
© Susie Stiles-Wolf