Being able to not know, for the poet John Keats (and the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who quoted him), means being “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. It gives rise to a state of mind in which your thoughts can wander and wonder, you can be curious, have feelings, and out of those feelings can grow thoughts, and you can dream and test out ideas and explore.