Good old Donald Rumsfeld and his unknown unknowns. All those things we don’t know we don’t know. Can’t worry about a thing if you don’t know it’s a thing, can you? At least, that’s the theory. I’ve been doing a bit of looking back at where I was, this time last year. Or the year before that. It’s the sort of thing you can do quite easily if your obsessive nature means you haven’t missed a daily entry in your diary since some point in the mid 80s. And flicking back 365 pages, or 730 (wait, was there a leap year?) I’ve been musing a bit on the idea that ignorance is bliss.

Obviously, in retrospect, you look back and think how much easier things were before you had had to come to terms with some of the more difficult things life has to throw at you. Not knowing what it feels like to deal with loss, for example, probably means you haven’t had to deal with loss yet, so it stands to reason that you might have been enjoying a comparatively blissful existence. But that’s kind of the point. Comparatively. And compared to something you haven’t yet experienced. So you probably wouldn’t be aware of it as anything other than normal. 

And, Mystic Meg excepted, we don’t generally know what’s lurking round the corner. Not knowing what’s going to happen in the future – well I guess that could go one of two ways. Either sparing you the knowledge of future difficulties, or creating a state of perpetual anxiety about things that may never happen. And the way it goes is probably purely dependent on personality. But even if you fall into the first category, I’m not sure that you could really say you were in blissful ignorance. I mean, how often do you sit back with a contented sigh and think how lucky you are not to know a load of things that you can’t quite pinpoint? Back to Donald and his unknown unknowns. 

Right now, I know some scary stuff, but I also know it’s not necessarily as scary as it might have been. This time last year I just knew some scary stuff. Rewind a year before that, and I knew nothing scary at all. In all three cases, however, according to my diary entries, I was mainly thinking about what colour to have my nails next, and whether January payday was ever planning to arrive. In fact, two years ago, I was also stressing about whether I’d annoyed one of my friends and whether I was ever going to shift the minuscule amount of weight I’d gained over Christmas. Obviously the subsequent years’ entries do include some concerns of a more serious nature, but it’s really quite hard to worry about serious stuff all the time. Whereas it was clearly not at all difficult for me to spend days at a time agonising over whether a hasty text sent without due attention to punctuation might have completely ruined a ten-year friendship. Skip forward a year or two, and I don’t have the luxury of spending all my time over-analysing such minutiae. Thank God. Because there are much more important things to think about. And in between the time spent worrying about properly serious stuff, there’s also time to do something other than worry, about some of the other things that matter. Like spending time with friends and family, for example. Including the friend of (now) 12 years who, as it turned out, hadn’t taken offence at the text I’d sent at all. In fact, she hadn’t read it at all. Because her phone was, at the time, nestled snugly in a jar of rice, in the airing cupboard. Which was what we used to do with our phones two years ago when we’d dropped them in a pint of beer and didn’t yet know that the whole ‘dry it through the absorbing power of rice’ technique was a bit of an old wives’ tale.

But we weren’t worried. Because we didn’t know we didn’t know.