The Comforts of Uncertainty

In recent years, uncertainty has become one of my greatest comforts. I find so much relief in reminding myself of all I do not know.

Mystery has become a pathway to peace.

My mind (like yours perhaps) loves projecting, predicting, and catastrophizing. It loves looking at a frustating situation, hard moment, or painful truth and spinning and extending it into distrous visions of cataclysmic ruin.

Left to its own devices, my mind usually opts away from the reasonable, low-drama approach. We’ve had to work hard together to get to any measure of calm composure and grounded equanimity.

And while its talents for creating patterns, making judgments, and crafting predictions have been immeasurably helpful in all sorts of ways, my mind often needs to be reminded that it is not the omnipotent power it presumes to be.

So this is what I do to help it along: I remind myself that every thought I think and every idea I believe is less than the absolute truth (because my mind does not have access to absolute truth). I remind myself that there are gaps – often significant ones – in my stories, beliefs, and predictions. I remember that interpretations of reality and actual reality are two very different things. I remind myself that I can never know for sure what will be real in 5 years, 5 weeks, or 5 minutes.

An important note: uncertainty is not denial. In other words, uncertainty does not refute what’s real or bypass what’s hard. It doesn’t say: I can never know anything, so I’m just going to opt out and ignore reality. It simply says: I do not and cannot know the whole story. I cannot know the future of what is now. And I cannot grasp the whole of reality in all its complexity, possibility, and dimensionality.

Which brings my energy and attention back to what is here for me now: in this moment of time and location in space.

Since I cannot know how the story ends, I am left with presence, mystery, and an open space where the only real and necessary thing is how I choose to live these questions: what will I do, and who will I be in this moment before me now?

Resistance and Stepping Between

I stepped between two people about to fight this week. Not to convince them to stop or to force them to do anything (because I couldn’t) - just to get in the way and interrupt the momentum of the conflict.

I didn’t do it to fix the problem, resolve the conflict, or determine the outcome. I did it because it was the thing to do in that moment.

This shifted some things around how I understand our political resistance. Instead of asking, how can I fix it? I wonder if often a more helpful question is: Given what’s real, what must I do in this moment?

Because I don’t know the answer the first question. I don’t know how to fix this.

I cannot single-handedly abolish ICE, end migrant detention, open our borders, or stomp out xenophobia and racism. And while I believe we can do these things collectively, we will drive ourselves to a breaking point if we make our agency contingent upon our ability to fix this mess immediately.

But we can make things harder. We can interrupt spirals of panic and hatred. We can bring clear energies to turbulent spaces. We can surprise, scare, and disrupt authoritarianism. We can make things more difficult, complicated, and uncomfortable by inserting our bodies, voices, and energies into what is already in motion.

The two people I stepped between may have still been able to get at each other, but it certainly would have been more cumbersome and complicated with (6 ft, 180 lbs) me in the middle. Suddenly they both had new questions to consider: can I get around this person? Do I want to try? Am I willing to harm a third-party? Even if the answers were all yes, having to consider them at all slowed it down, if only by fractions.

What spaces of pause, dilemma, and interruption can we create?

Resistance invites us to get creative with our power and agency. It asks us to use our power to derail, connect, refuse, dissent, create, dream, transgress, step in, stand up, and speak out. It asks us to find new and inventive ways to become radiant beacons of our truth and power.

So even when it’s hard and feels impossible, I’m remembering: All of it counts. All of it matters. And all of it’s essential.