Choosing the Uncertain Path

Uncertainty is our ally.

I say this all the time, and no one wants to hear it.

I don’t know when it became the enemy, or how our ability to live into it atrophied. I don’t understand how the dominant narratives began to fetishize certainty, and knowingness or how anyone came to believe it was an entitlement, a natural state, or a baseline requirement for health or happiness.

I understand that all animals enjoy periods of safety – but we also know that wild animals have lost something profound when we confine or habituate them to human regulated environments, with food and water provided on a regular schedule, where many dangers are apparently eliminated, and the certainty of survival from one day to the next is too assured.

When I consider how safety is brokered in natural settings it is never an assumption. It is actively constructed, often vigilantly guarded, and almost always temporary. Periods of certainty and safety are sought out for periods of rest, for recovery, or for a brief period while rearing young. But we also know that nests and dens are regularly raided by predators or destroyed by wind, fire, flood. Safety in the wilderness is functional, purposeful, brief, and never inviolate.

We are a strange culture. One that dismisses rest as only for the weak or lazy, but demands and even hoards certainty, stealing it from others, attempting to nullify the core uncertainty, unpredictability that sits at the center of life itself.

Here is a truth: We do not know what will happen next. We do not know what the outcome will be, and if we get what we think we want we don’t know if it will be “good” for us or others.  Sometimes the cruelest thing is to be granted our heart’s desire.

We have grown so suspicious and alienated from uncertainty that sometimes we recoil from it and retreat into the comforting certainty of nihilism and despair.  Some have decided that we are certainly fucked because it is easier than living with the tension, the responsibility, the humility of not knowing.

On this complex earth certainty is hubris. No matter how astute our calculations, there are always variables that cannot be anticipated. There are gremlins, goblins, tricksters lurking, waiting to send the crossroads spinning no matter how carefully we have chartered our course.  Dismiss them at your own risk.

As a vegan friend once said when talking about the relationship between diet and longevity: “I could still step off the curb and be killed by a Boar’s Head meat truck tomorrow.”  And the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

We just don’t know that much. We cannot control it all. Chaos breaks in, for good or ill, when we least expect it. Lightening can strike on a sunny day. Late-stage cancers can stall or even disappear against all prognostic odds (I know this for fact).  Strokes of luck – good or bad, flukes and freak events, the drunkards walk of statistical probability can bump into us diverting our trajectory into the arms of death or the love of our lives. The tallest buildings can collapse after being attacked on what seemed to be a perfect September morning.

This is not unnatural. This is how life and death unfold.

Here is the good news:

Certain doom is not so certain either. The future, immediate or distant, is never as sure as we think.  Deus ex machina can descend and transform a tragedy into a comedy. And we have no idea what future historical event might occur at any moment to reorganize our current collective political pathologies. We have no idea which single grain will be the one to tip the scales.

God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path, violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans, intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse…  ~ C. G. Jung, Letter to The Listener, 1/21/1960

This is not an essay about powerlessness or nihilism or the “fuck its” – although I am almost certain there are some that will read it that way. I’d suggest that anyone who feels merely hopeless at the prospect of withstanding uncertainty is already foreclosing on it. Too often we choose the certainty of impotence over the tension, discomfort, the possibility, the liberation, and the unfathomable responsibility that comes from taking considered action in the face of all we do not know.

Uncertainty intensifies the responsibility on our shoulders. It means we can never know all the good or ill that will flow from the events that we initiate or perpetuate, and that we have some ownership of all the intended and unintended outcomes. We can only use our admittedly limited capacities to try to discern where to direct our energies and then be prepared to be surprised in any and every direction.

And this is true too: Most of the actions we take will have both intended and unintended consequences. The good we fight for will certainly have destructive impacts. The wounds we inflict may produce pearls.

There is no knowing.

What if anything could happen? What if we could breathe into the power and powerlessness of that all at once? What if a butterfly’s wings could produce a hurricane halfway around the world? What if any short straw could be the one that breaks the camel’s back? What if the laughter of one small boy could shake a kingdom from the thrall of a naked emperor?

What if everything we do matters, even if we can’t possibly know for sure how or when?

The challenge of the era, it seems to me, is to learn to live into the uncertainty of it all, to become more suspicious of facile optimism or certain doom.

Fate intrudes on our willful paths, and maybe life in all its fullness only emerges in the uncertain spaces where human will and the Hand of Fate converge.