My mother called me with a mystery. There were supposed to be six speakers in a box in her basement. Now there were only two. Four were missing. She was adamant that the box had originally contained six. She remembered it clearly. And as far as she knew, the only person who regularly went into the basement was my son.
Naturally, the first thought was obvious. Where did the other four speakers go? I had already told my mother that I couldn’t imagine anyone taking them. They were old analog speakers, the kind of equipment most people wouldn’t have much use for anymore. And I was particularly confident that my son wouldn’t have taken them.
But now I had a problem.
How do you decide who to believe when you trust both people?
Today, I asked my son about the speakers. He looked at me and genuinely had no idea what I was talking about. No hesitation. No obvious attempt to explain anything away. He simply didn’t know.
And suddenly, I was stuck between two versions of reality.
My mother remembers six speakers.
My son says he knows nothing about them.
Both are people I love.
Both are people I trust.
And I realized how uncomfortable uncertainty can be.
Our instinct is to solve the mystery immediately. We want someone to be responsible. We want an explanation. We want the pieces to fit neatly into a story.
But what if they don’t?
What if my mother is absolutely certain about something she remembers incorrectly?
What if my son genuinely has no idea what happened?
What if the speakers were moved years ago?
What if someone else had access to the basement?
What if the answer is something so ordinary that we’re simply not seeing it?
The older I get, the more I realize that certainty and truth aren’t always the same thing.
We can remember something with complete confidence and still be wrong.
We can hear someone’s explanation and still not have the whole story.
And sometimes, the most honest answer is simply: “I don’t know.”
That’s harder than it sounds.
We want to protect the people we love, but we also don’t want to dismiss the people we love.
So perhaps the right response isn’t to immediately choose a side.
It’s to leave room for uncertainty.
To ask questions without accusations.
To listen without deciding the outcome beforehand.
And most importantly, to remember that not every mystery needs to be solved today.
Maybe the four speakers will eventually turn up.
Maybe we’ll discover a perfectly logical explanation.
Or maybe they’ll remain one of those strange little mysteries that families carry around for years.
But this experience reminded me of something much bigger than speakers.
Trust isn’t always about knowing exactly what happened.
Sometimes trust is being willing to say: “I believe you both. And I don’t know how both stories fit together yet.”
Perhaps that’s part of living too.
Learning to sit comfortably in the space between what we know…and what we don’t.