“Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”
- Gilda Radner
Years ago, I set off on a faint trail in the far reaches of the Needles District in Canyonlands National Park, following ambiguous instructions from an online trip report in an attempt to reach a cavern in the cliffside.
Instead, I became quite lost in a labyrinth of sandstone and sage brush. I somehow circled back to the same boulders over and over. Fear increasingly closed in on my options. In a panic, I ran, until I ran out of water. I yelled for help, but I was on my own.
Lost in the desert is an adjacent emotional experience to uncertainty. We all respond differently, but the same survival wiring seems to be involved: fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
I fly into a frenzy of action, a bull in a china shop, in a wild attempt to regain a sense of control. Fueled by fear deeply rooted in my past, I regress to child-level skills and black-and-white thinking.
In the midst of uncertainty, the same holds true. I work to resolve the angst as quickly as possible. Pros and cons lists. Online research. Sound boarding with anyone nearby. An inability to focus on anything else until I make a decision.
Many years of turning uncertainty into chaos have led to hard-earned awareness of the angst and a deep appreciation for the actual medicine: curiosity.
Some of us wrestle with uncertainty. Others run full speed in the opposite direction. Some become paralyzed. And still others will cozy up to someone to make the decision for them.
Beyond the discomfort of feeling lost, modern culture isn’t a fan of indecisiveness. The pace of our lives is rapid. There’s no time to be contemplative. We’re trained from a young age to make decisions logically based on a set of rules and an assigned identity. “Why?” was commonly met with, “Because.”
There is an illusory comfort in such constraints. Girls are sensitive. Boys are strong. Bad people get caught by police and go to jail. We grow up to get married and have children. We continually author rules for ourselves and others as a way to feel safe in our communal belonging and to navigate the hundreds of decisions we need to make each day. Many can attest to the ability to live an entire life while suppressing core truths simply because those truths didn’t compute inside the rules they were raised to live by. Once you’ve built an entire life on a particular framework, absolutely everything feels threatened if the base were to tremble.
This is all to say: If you get squirmy when faced with even minor uncertainty, you are not alone. The one mythical rule to rule them all: control is safety. Uncertainty can feel unsafe, but it wasn’t always this way.
We were born into total dependence and uncertainty, and also pure curiosity and wonder. New and unknown was the norm. We wanted to do and know everything, right now. If we were lucky, we had a few patient caregivers and teachers along the way who responded positively to our relentless questions and messy experiments. Inevitably, we also found the boundaries of that patience, unpredictably traipsing into shame and rejection territory.
What were you thinking? You should know better. Duh. Don’t ask dumb questions. Don’t be ridiculous.
Rejection can be a life-and-death situation for a child. Shame is the most efficient author of limiting rules. Etched right on the heart: I should already know.
It only takes a few painful reprimands to attach certainty to safety, and uncertainty to danger.
From the wide perspective of curious wondering, we can reframe any limiting belief, or the cascade of feared outcomes.
What if “I don’t know” wasn’t associated with a crisis or personal failure?
Clearly, we must discover unknown parts of life and ourselves in order to grow. To remain only in our knowing is to become trapped in our own Truman Show reality. The pain of an inauthentic life is tremendously underappreciated precisely because it is a sin to not know. The tears of self-sacrifice are spilled alone on bathroom floors, inside car garages, and on therapy couches. It is far more common to wake up each morning with the deep ache of being lost within the life you yourself authored than you’d ever imagine. We get stuck because of all those rules about who we are and how to be good and happy.
To embrace the discomfort of unknowing is to return to our birthplace of unlimited possibilities, which requires quite a lot of courage, and at least a few similarly courageous friends. It’s perhaps more critical than ever to grow our capacity for uncertainty as we all contend with an increasingly uncertain future.
What if we decided henceforth that not knowing is now brave, strong, wise, and ripe with potency? What would it look like to patiently encourage your shaky wonderings, messy experiments, and new discoveries?
“Exploration doesn’t need to culminate in bullet-pointed certainty about anything. Thoughts and feelings don’t need to operate with an itinerary. It’s okay to hold something for a long time, look at it, turn it over, feel it, think about it, turn it over again, talk about it, write about it, and then look up and say, ‘I don’t know.’”
- Katherine Morgan Schafler
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