Walking down a busy road in Hyderabad, I notice something weird hanging from the overhead wire. Such a strange thing, a router? What is it doing there? I briefly wonder, then move on. I have somewhere to be. Can’t be questioning every strange object on Indian roads - would never get anywhere!
Reading an exciting novel, I reach a point where the author starts describing a scene with fancy vocabulary. I am too lazy to look them up in a dictionary, so I just skim over them hoping I will get the plot nevertheless. Otherwise, I would never finish the book!
I am talking to my partner. She is telling me a story of something that happened in her extended family. I listen for a bit, then get distracted. When I come back, the story doesn’t make any sense anymore. I missed important details! Should I plead guilty or just hope that I can get away with it by just nodding and looking interested?
These three moments share something. Confusion flickered and I let it go. In the first two cases the reason was straightforward - I had somewhere to be, a book to finish (suspense to unravel). It felt like low stakes confusion and the destination felt high priority. Seems like a reasonable trade.
The third is more interesting. I let the confusion go because admitting it may cost me something? I had zoned out listening to my partner tell a short story. A good one, too (she’s a natural storyteller). As someone who talks about mindfulness and authentic relating all the time, someone who is known to be a “good listener”, the cost of admitting confusion was maybe higher than the cost of staying confused?
What does confusion feel like?
So what does noticing confusion actually feel like? I think it’s a brief, very easy to miss feeling. Something doesn’t add up and you register it for a second before life pulls you away.
If you do notice it and sit with it, there’s some tension to that feeling, some discomfort. Like a knot in your mind. It can also show up like an itch that needs to be scratched, leading to mild restlessness. Most people can relate to this feeling when they are watching a movie and there’s a strong intentionality to create confusion in the plot in the form of suspense. The main character is confused and you feel confused alongside her.
And when you get additional information that helps you resolve it, when something clicks, you feel lighter. “Ah, that clears it!”. The knot has been untied.
Why do we look away?
Looking away from confusion can both be an unconscious or conscious decision (more of the former in my experience). I can think of at least four reasons why it happens:
Avoiding Friction - The situation requires effort without any clear payoff - usually a rational move. The author is describing a scene and you don’t feel there’s enough to gain from slowing down. You are eager to know what the characters do next. That’s what’s keeping you hooked. Scene details are getting in the way, so you just skip over them.
Protecting Ego - Maybe admitting confusions costs you your self-image. In the situation I described above with my partner, admitting confusion would make me confront the “good listener” identity, potentially hurting my ego in the process.
Fear of unwanted truth - What if resolving this confusion reveals something I don’t want to know? About a relationship, about myself. For instance, I am a bit confused about my father’s tone in a recent call with him. I stay confused and don’t bring it up, worried that I might learn something I am not ready to sit with.
Distraction - Confusion occurs for a fraction of second but the majority of attention is already somewhere else. You never even register it. Our attention spans have become progressively worse with infinite scrolls on social media. Minor confusions don’t stand a chance!
How did we get here?
Some of these patterns are probably wired into us. They are useful instincts from environments where social status and quick emotional reactions mattered a lot. But I would argue that the more damaging ones get trained into us early in life.
Let’s go back to our school life. The teacher is explaining a concept, she asks a question. You understand neither the concept, nor the question. What’s the smart move there? Raise your hand, admit confusion and get embarrassed? Worse is the possibility that the teacher will snap at you for not paying attention! (this happened to me twice in my school life and I vividly remember kids giggling when the teacher snapped). You kinda learn to keep up or shut up.
12-14 years of this and you don’t just suppress it in classrooms, you suppress it everywhere, even if there are no social costs involved. It has become a habit.
On top of that, you add the way in which social media is designed. Every post or every scroll gives you a complete unit, that requires no sitting with ambiguity. You rarely have to tolerate the state of not-yet-understanding. It’s not just distracting, it is training you to expect that feeling of incompleteness to resolve immediately. And because of that design, the moment discomfort appears - as confusion, boredom, anxiety - we reach for the phone.
And so overtime, the mental knots form and they persist but we lose the capability to notice they formed in the first place. You end up walking around with a bundle of unresolved knots you never actually registered as knots.
So why is this a problem?
What are we actually losing out on if we walk around with these unresolved knots. Three concrete losses come to mind, depending on the context in which you fail to notice or acknowledge the confusion:
Shallow Perception - Reality has layers of complexity, so much richness. We move through life in shallow contact with it. When you fail to notice confusion, you fail to appreciate this richness. I noticed this fully when I first practiced Circling. In Circling, you sit with strangers or friends in a circle and you just observe them. No agenda, no small talk, nothing. You observe and you share whatever is coming up for you in your body/mind about the present moment. This practice allowed me to see human beings at a much deeper level than I had before. There’s so much information in everyone’s faces and body language.
Self Knowledge - When you notice confusion, you can learn quite a bit about how your mind works. You get a chance to have a healthier relationship with your emotions. You notice more patterns about how your attention works (or breaks) and even how you learn (or struggle to). It’s easiest for me to observe this when I get rid of distractions and sit down to learn something new from a physical book. Not only do I absorb the content better, I get to acknowledge and address my confusions and learn about my learning patterns.
Growth and confidence - It can be freeing to acknowledge confusion openly. I spent most of my school and college years pretending I understood when I didn’t. It was a bit exhausting, that kind of performance. Slightly on guard, worried about being found out. The person who admits confusion freely rarely has nothing to protect.
Can we do anything about it?
Any solution to a problem has to start with a proper acknowledgment that the problem exists. But acknowledgement isn’t enough. You need to practice. Just like anything else, noticing confusion is a skill that can be learned and improved upon.
Practicing noticing confusion can take many forms. You can try to create a habit of making a mental note or even saying out loud “I notice I am confused” everytime you sense a mental knot (Note: knot is a metaphor that works for me but feel free to reflect and come up with your own visual imagery for this feeling). This verbal externalization forces that vague and brief feeling into language which can make it harder to ignore.
Initially, it is enough to just notice. No pressure to resolve. If your curiosity pulls you towards finding an answer, follow it. But if resolving feels like an obligation, you will again start associating confusion with effort and resistance. Not healthy.
It’s worth noting that some people naturally notice confusion more than others. They tend to be people who reflect deeply or who meditate regularly or who were lucky to never learn to be ashamed of not understanding something. If you aren’t naturally gifted, then consistent meditation or journaling can help you slow down enough that you are better able to catch these brief moments of confusion.
What about when you are with others? As I mentioned earlier, authentic relating practices like Circling are great for this. They help you get more comfortable with (and even befriend!) the awkwardness and discomfort that comes with genuine human engagement. And if you notice you are confused while listening to someone or are just losing them, just say so. I notice this shifts something. It opens a door for deeper connection.
Another practice that helps me sometimes is simply summarizing what the other person was trying to explain. This works especially well when I am listening to a story and I notice I am confused - maybe they were speaking too fast, or I got distracted, or some sequence of events was genuinely puzzling - but I don’t want to interrupt. So I wait for the next opportunity to speak and then I just summarize what I heard, just to check if I am on the same page. You don’t have to admit you lost the thread and you still get to resolve your confusion. And more often than not, they will be glad you were paying that much attention.
But I wouldn’t worry about finding the best strategies to resolve confusion. You just need to start noticing first, one flicker at a time. One moment where you catch yourself about to look away and you don’t.
So what was it that was hanging from the wire?
I am still not 100% sure but I did try to resolve my confusion while writing this article. It is either a cable tv splitter box for distributing tv signal or it is a fiber internet box from local internet providers. I couldn’t tell if the wire is a fiber cable or a tv cable. Confusion is somewhat resolved but not completely.
We let go of these moments of confusion many times in a single day - on streets, in conversations, while reading/watching something, in our own heads. We don’t have to address each of them. We can’t.
But it is worth knowing that these moments exist and if we slow down to address a few of them, there’s a beautifully rich world out there waiting to be embraced.
Crossposted from Substack.
Walking down a busy road in Hyderabad, I notice something weird hanging from the overhead wire. Such a strange thing, a router? What is it doing there? I briefly wonder, then move on. I have somewhere to be. Can’t be questioning every strange object on Indian roads - would never get anywhere!
Reading an exciting novel, I reach a point where the author starts describing a scene with fancy vocabulary. I am too lazy to look them up in a dictionary, so I just skim over them hoping I will get the plot nevertheless. Otherwise, I would never finish the book!
I am talking to my partner. She is telling me a story of something that happened in her extended family. I listen for a bit, then get distracted. When I come back, the story doesn’t make any sense anymore. I missed important details! Should I plead guilty or just hope that I can get away with it by just nodding and looking interested?
These three moments share something. Confusion flickered and I let it go. In the first two cases the reason was straightforward - I had somewhere to be, a book to finish (suspense to unravel). It felt like low stakes confusion and the destination felt high priority. Seems like a reasonable trade.
The third is more interesting. I let the confusion go because admitting it may cost me something? I had zoned out listening to my partner tell a short story. A good one, too (she’s a natural storyteller). As someone who talks about mindfulness and authentic relating all the time, someone who is known to be a “good listener”, the cost of admitting confusion was maybe higher than the cost of staying confused?
What does confusion feel like?
So what does noticing confusion actually feel like? I think it’s a brief, very easy to miss feeling. Something doesn’t add up and you register it for a second before life pulls you away.
If you do notice it and sit with it, there’s some tension to that feeling, some discomfort. Like a knot in your mind. It can also show up like an itch that needs to be scratched, leading to mild restlessness. Most people can relate to this feeling when they are watching a movie and there’s a strong intentionality to create confusion in the plot in the form of suspense. The main character is confused and you feel confused alongside her.
And when you get additional information that helps you resolve it, when something clicks, you feel lighter. “Ah, that clears it!”. The knot has been untied.
Why do we look away?
Looking away from confusion can both be an unconscious or conscious decision (more of the former in my experience). I can think of at least four reasons why it happens:
Avoiding Friction - The situation requires effort without any clear payoff - usually a rational move. The author is describing a scene and you don’t feel there’s enough to gain from slowing down. You are eager to know what the characters do next. That’s what’s keeping you hooked. Scene details are getting in the way, so you just skip over them.
Protecting Ego - Maybe admitting confusions costs you your self-image. In the situation I described above with my partner, admitting confusion would make me confront the “good listener” identity, potentially hurting my ego in the process.
Fear of unwanted truth - What if resolving this confusion reveals something I don’t want to know? About a relationship, about myself. For instance, I am a bit confused about my father’s tone in a recent call with him. I stay confused and don’t bring it up, worried that I might learn something I am not ready to sit with.
Distraction - Confusion occurs for a fraction of second but the majority of attention is already somewhere else. You never even register it. Our attention spans have become progressively worse with infinite scrolls on social media. Minor confusions don’t stand a chance!
How did we get here?
Some of these patterns are probably wired into us. They are useful instincts from environments where social status and quick emotional reactions mattered a lot. But I would argue that the more damaging ones get trained into us early in life.
Let’s go back to our school life. The teacher is explaining a concept, she asks a question. You understand neither the concept, nor the question. What’s the smart move there? Raise your hand, admit confusion and get embarrassed? Worse is the possibility that the teacher will snap at you for not paying attention! (this happened to me twice in my school life and I vividly remember kids giggling when the teacher snapped). You kinda learn to keep up or shut up.
12-14 years of this and you don’t just suppress it in classrooms, you suppress it everywhere, even if there are no social costs involved. It has become a habit.
On top of that, you add the way in which social media is designed. Every post or every scroll gives you a complete unit, that requires no sitting with ambiguity. You rarely have to tolerate the state of not-yet-understanding. It’s not just distracting, it is training you to expect that feeling of incompleteness to resolve immediately. And because of that design, the moment discomfort appears - as confusion, boredom, anxiety - we reach for the phone.
And so overtime, the mental knots form and they persist but we lose the capability to notice they formed in the first place. You end up walking around with a bundle of unresolved knots you never actually registered as knots.
So why is this a problem?
What are we actually losing out on if we walk around with these unresolved knots. Three concrete losses come to mind, depending on the context in which you fail to notice or acknowledge the confusion:
Shallow Perception - Reality has layers of complexity, so much richness. We move through life in shallow contact with it. When you fail to notice confusion, you fail to appreciate this richness. I noticed this fully when I first practiced Circling. In Circling, you sit with strangers or friends in a circle and you just observe them. No agenda, no small talk, nothing. You observe and you share whatever is coming up for you in your body/mind about the present moment. This practice allowed me to see human beings at a much deeper level than I had before. There’s so much information in everyone’s faces and body language.
Self Knowledge - When you notice confusion, you can learn quite a bit about how your mind works. You get a chance to have a healthier relationship with your emotions. You notice more patterns about how your attention works (or breaks) and even how you learn (or struggle to). It’s easiest for me to observe this when I get rid of distractions and sit down to learn something new from a physical book. Not only do I absorb the content better, I get to acknowledge and address my confusions and learn about my learning patterns.
Growth and confidence - It can be freeing to acknowledge confusion openly. I spent most of my school and college years pretending I understood when I didn’t. It was a bit exhausting, that kind of performance. Slightly on guard, worried about being found out. The person who admits confusion freely rarely has nothing to protect.
Can we do anything about it?
Any solution to a problem has to start with a proper acknowledgment that the problem exists. But acknowledgement isn’t enough. You need to practice. Just like anything else, noticing confusion is a skill that can be learned and improved upon.
Practicing noticing confusion can take many forms. You can try to create a habit of making a mental note or even saying out loud “I notice I am confused” everytime you sense a mental knot (Note: knot is a metaphor that works for me but feel free to reflect and come up with your own visual imagery for this feeling). This verbal externalization forces that vague and brief feeling into language which can make it harder to ignore.
Initially, it is enough to just notice. No pressure to resolve. If your curiosity pulls you towards finding an answer, follow it. But if resolving feels like an obligation, you will again start associating confusion with effort and resistance. Not healthy.
It’s worth noting that some people naturally notice confusion more than others. They tend to be people who reflect deeply or who meditate regularly or who were lucky to never learn to be ashamed of not understanding something. If you aren’t naturally gifted, then consistent meditation or journaling can help you slow down enough that you are better able to catch these brief moments of confusion.
What about when you are with others? As I mentioned earlier, authentic relating practices like Circling are great for this. They help you get more comfortable with (and even befriend!) the awkwardness and discomfort that comes with genuine human engagement. And if you notice you are confused while listening to someone or are just losing them, just say so. I notice this shifts something. It opens a door for deeper connection.
Another practice that helps me sometimes is simply summarizing what the other person was trying to explain. This works especially well when I am listening to a story and I notice I am confused - maybe they were speaking too fast, or I got distracted, or some sequence of events was genuinely puzzling - but I don’t want to interrupt. So I wait for the next opportunity to speak and then I just summarize what I heard, just to check if I am on the same page. You don’t have to admit you lost the thread and you still get to resolve your confusion. And more often than not, they will be glad you were paying that much attention.
But I wouldn’t worry about finding the best strategies to resolve confusion. You just need to start noticing first, one flicker at a time. One moment where you catch yourself about to look away and you don’t.
So what was it that was hanging from the wire?
I am still not 100% sure but I did try to resolve my confusion while writing this article. It is either a cable tv splitter box for distributing tv signal or it is a fiber internet box from local internet providers. I couldn’t tell if the wire is a fiber cable or a tv cable. Confusion is somewhat resolved but not completely.
We let go of these moments of confusion many times in a single day - on streets, in conversations, while reading/watching something, in our own heads. We don’t have to address each of them. We can’t.
But it is worth knowing that these moments exist and if we slow down to address a few of them, there’s a beautifully rich world out there waiting to be embraced.