We often think of clarity as the ability to understand, to solve, to explain. But Camus points to a deeper kind of clarity: the honest recognition of what we cannot understand.

The human mind craves answers. We want to know why we are here, what happens after death, whether our lives have meaning. We build philosophies, religions, and sciences to address these hungers. And yet the universe remains silent. It offers no explanations, no reassurances, no ultimate truths we can hold in our hands and verify. This gap between our desperate need to understand and the world’s refusal to answer is what Camus calls the absurd.

But notice his phrasing. The absurd is not the collapse of reason. It is reason working properly, pushed to its furthest reach, and honestly reporting back: I can go no further. This is not failure. This is integrity. A mind that pretends to know what it cannot know is not clear but deluded.

There is unexpected freedom here. When you stop demanding answers the universe will not provide, you can finally attend to what is actually before you. The questions do not disappear, but they stop tormenting. You learn to live within uncertainty rather than against it.

Today, identify one question you have been forcing an answer to. What if clarity means holding it open instead?