There is a beautiful idea shared by Cheryl Strayed that has stayed with me for years. She once said that every problem she has ever had has been solved by a To-Know list.
A To-Know list is about awareness. It is about consciousness. It asks, What is actually true here?
And very often, what we need is not more doing or pushing or going. We actually need a little more “knowing.” When someone is struggling with a major life decision—whether to become a parent, leave a relationship, change careers, forgive someone, move across the world—the mind immediately begins to spin stories. The blank spaces in a path or a plan get filled in with fear, not logic. Anxiety disguises itself as wisdom. But in her book Tiny Beautiful Things Cheryl Strayed suggests this very simple practice. It begins by writing down the questions:
What am I afraid will happen if I do this?
What am I afraid I will lose if I do this?
What could I gain if I do this?
How will these gains and losses affect my life?
What are the things I don’t know about doing this?
It sounds almost too basic. But it is quietly profound. Because most of our suffering does not come from the decision itself. It comes from the unspoken, unexamined narrative swirling beneath it.
In Kabbalah, we learn that chaos thrives in concealment. When something is hidden—even within our own consciousness—it festers and becomes distorted. Fear, when unnamed, turns from one drop of rain into a full-blown hurricane. Doubt, when unspoken, becomes stagnation. But the moment we bring something into the Light—onto the page, into language, into awareness—it begins to lose its power.
A friend of mine had been going back and forth for over a year trying to decide if she should stay in her hometown or move back to Los Angeles. She is a single parent raising a special needs child, and has worked so hard to build a foundation for him where they’re currently living. And yet, the promise of better schools, more academic support, and the possibility of greater community whispered from the city she used to call home. It should have been a relatively easy decision so why did she still feel so unclear?
After writing out her To-Know list she realized that there was one big consideration she was leaving out entirely: herself. She realized the fears she had revolved around her son, the gains were about what would be possible for him. And while this is admirable and the way any parent should approach big decisions that will affect their child, removing herself from the decision made it impossible.
She finally realized that what she actually needed was to find ways to get more support around her in her current living situation. Her son was stabilized, and now she needed to focus on stabilizing herself, and a move was actually the last thing either of them needed—at least for now.
When you write down what you are afraid of, you often discover that the fear is not as solid as it seemed. It may not even be yours. It may be inherited, absorbed, or imagined. And when you write down what you could gain, you may realize that your soul has been whispering to you all along. There is something transformative about seeing your thoughts outside of yourself. On paper, they stop being you. They become information.
And information can be worked with.
What I love most about the to-know list is that it shifts us from reaction to reflection. From urgency to inquiry. From ego to essence.
And curiosity is a gateway to consciousness.
Often, when people are stuck, they assume the answer will come from force. If they just think harder. If they analyze longer. If they gather more opinions. But clarity rarely arrives through pressure. It arrives through presence. Just like my friend, when you allow yourself to ask the right questions—without rushing toward a conclusion—you create space for wisdom to emerge.
And here is the deeper truth: the answers do come.
They come not as lightning bolts, but as quiet realizations. As a sense of steadiness. As a recognition of what feels expansive rather than constricting. You begin to see which parts of your resistance are fear and which parts are intuition. You begin to separate the voice of doubt from the voice of your soul. That discernment changes everything.
The To-Know list teaches us something universal: most decisions are not about the outer circumstance. They are about us and the things we believe about ourselves.
Are we someone who trusts?
Are we someone who can withstand loss?
Are we someone who believes we are worthy of gain?
When you put your fears and hopes on paper, you are not just solving a problem. You are revealing your consciousness. And once you can see your consciousness, you can transform it. This is why awareness is always the first step toward change. Not action. Not perfection. Awareness. So the next time you find yourself at a crossroads, resist the urge to immediately do something. Instead, start a to-know list.
Let the questions guide you inward. Let the Light meet you in the inquiry. Because sometimes the most powerful movement forward begins with telling yourself the truth. We just might need a little help finding it first.
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