In July last year I decided to take a short holiday on my own; a break, inspired by a desire to revisit the footsteps of my youth and to romantically recapture something lost in me for which I’d spent years searching.

That was the headline. In truth I was running away.

I’d been made redundant for the first time. I was leaving a job I loved, leaving friends with whom I’d worked for more than 20 years and all the certainty and security that went with that. I was upset, fed up and tired of showing a brave face. Damaged. Scarred. Scared. I had responsibilities and promises to keep. I was terrified I had and was going to “let people down”. I had no plan, no idea and no knowledge of what I was going to do next.

So I left the office, drove to the airport, got on a plane and left it all behind. I went to find my answers.

For those I’d told, Jerusalem seemed a strange destination. An “odd choice”. Sun, but no sun loungers. A place of perceived unrest, potential danger and, for someone in search of certainty and security, a place which offered no such thing.

To me it made sense. It was a place I knew and knew well; somewhere I loved, talked about and had visited so many times but, for some reason, had abandoned. It was an old friend and it was time to pay a visit.

I’d booked a rooftop mattress at an Old City hostel I’d first stayed at in 1991 and, like so much in that ancient, walled labyrinth, it was unchanged, still coated in the dust of pilgrims laid down over 800 years of visitations, still groaning at the modern demands put upon its leaden, pre-war plumbing.

It was perfect. Life stopped. I stopped. I slept, I read and and I stretched my legs, re-treading old paths and finding new ones. For five days I conversed only with waiters, shop keepers and people who, like me, had come to a place in search of answers. Many were transient, others “in residence” and some, a few, who had committed themselves wholly to that quest.

But this isn’t a travelogue. I came home. I was totally refreshed but empty handed. I had failed. Nothing had changed; I had no further clue as to what I was going to do next.

So I guess I just got on with it. Pottering, searching, doubting, fretting and the other job hunting delights often alien to one who had always been “busy”.

And then, just before Christmas, at a particularly low point, it struck me. I did have the answer. I did have the the reassurance I’d been looking for and I did find it in Jerusalem.

Sort of.

Somewhere between there and a memory of my grandmother.

I stayed with her one summer at that adolescent turn of life when hormones battle daily with the last remnants of innocence. She had so much to tell me and I had so little time to listen, countering her knowledge with the brusque, arrogant “I know” of my coming teens.

“I cant imagine how awful it must be to know everything” she said.

I think it annoyed me, that throw away comment from a wise old bird, making me feel slightly stupid in my lack of understanding. She died a few months later, but I kept that memory, always wondering what she’d meant and what I’d missed.

But I get it now. Knowing (and its assumption) is a horrible thing; it’s the foundation of hatred, fundamentalism and joylessness, the arrogance fuelling the bitterness and rhetoric of our modern politics. It deafens listening and discourse, it stifles our growth, crushes empathy, drives us from one another and turns us inward, forcing us to question the value of our opinions and ideas in fear of bullying, name calling and social media censure; the playground weapons of those who “know”.

The joy of our future is surely that it remains unknown? We have no right to its secrets. I had no right to expect and know a path laid out for me and, if I had, would it truly be the path that I wanted? Would that not have spoiled it somehow? What would I have learned, and how dull my journey?

I realised it’s the reason I felt so good when I got back from Jerusalem. I’d left the UK just after the Brexit referendum where the tidal wave of knowing had swamped us all with its ugliness and had instead bathed in an atmosphere where, for thousands of years people had simply searched for answers, where hope and faith remind the constant, where certainty would never have a place. That was its magic. That was why I loved it. That’s what I’d forgotten.

And, after several months of job hunting, that remains the day to day challenge: To remember that the future and the success I seek will remain “unknown” to me, that it will simply unfold day by day, and the joy of my life will be determined by that and my refusal to stop looking for it. That it will all be all right and that only at the very end will I be able to look back and “know”; hopefully with a smile on my face. Somedays it’s hard; hard not to succumb to pessimism and to assume I know what’s going to happen. Somedays it’s a delight.

Maybe that’s our challenge; to learn to know less and love it more. I hope so. The future looks kinder and more hopeful that way.