with that.
And one way to deal with it is to see the value in uncertainty. Far from being a curse, uncertainty can be a source of hope. Okay, so yes, it means that the things we are looking forward to might not be as good as we want them to be, but it also means that the things we dread might not be as terrible as we imagine.
For instance, how many times have you heard people talk about blessings in disguise? How many times have we heard about someone who has been afflicted with a terrible misfortune—an illness, a redundancy, a bankruptcy, whatever—then ends up feeling thankful for it, or at least for some aspect of it?
The moments of deepest pain in my life were also the moments I learned the most about myself. Just as some of the things we look forward to aren’t as good as we planned—like a disastrous vacation or a nightmare job that sounded good on paper, a marriage that turned sour—so it is true that many of the hard things in life arrive with lessons or silver linings or a welcome new perspective or reasons to be grateful.
So, while we see uncertainty as innately unwanted, because it means bad things might happen, uncertainty is also our protection against bad things. Because at some point, in any life, something bad will happen, and it is the inherent uncertainty of what that bad thing will ultimately mean to you, what it will lead to, and what it will reveal, that enables us to have a more enduring and resilient kind of hope. A hope that doesn’t wish for bad things not to happen—because they sometimes do—but rather one that enables us to see that bad things are never the whole story. They are as filled with uncertain outcomes as everything else.
In short, we never know. The only certainty is uncertainty. And so, if we are to reach any kind of constant comfort, we need to find comfort in uncertainty. And it is there. Because while things are uncertain, they are never closed. We can exist in hope, in the infinite, in the unanswered and open question of life itself.
Portal
Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change our mind.
Nothing is closed
One of the reasons we like stories is because we like structure. We like a beginning, a middle, and an end. We especially like a good ending. Think of all the times our opinion of a book or a movie has hinged on the ending. If a movie has a terrible ending it often ruins the whole thing for us.
The film director Jean-Luc Godard said a story should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. And I used to love that quote, and agree with it, until I went through a breakdown and craved the comfort of classic narratives. Of beginnings and middles and ends in that order. And I liked endings that wrapped things up nicely, with a big bow.
I craved resolution. But of course, life doesn’t really have a resolution. Even death isn’t a resolution. Even if we don’t believe in an afterlife, we have to acknowledge that the world after us goes on in unknowable ways, and also the ways people will or will not remember us are unknowable too.
There are only open endings in life. And this isn’t a curse. This is a good thing. As the Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön puts it, “we suffer from resolution.” I find that idea so liberating. To admit that closure is unreachable in a universe where everything is open.
The bearable rightness of being
Being > doing
Reconnection
My anxiety feels very much a symptom of modern life. At its deepest, years ago, I began to notice that it was always at its most acute when I was doing something that would have been entirely alien to our cave-people ancestors. Walking in a crowded shopping center. Listening to loud techno music. Wandering under the artificial light of a supermarket. Sitting for too long in front of a TV or computer screen. Eating a bag of tortilla chips at one in the morning. Stressful emails. City centers. Packed trains. Online squabbles. Modern mental overload.
It is no coincidence that the things that comfort me when I am super-frazzled, the things that calm and soothe me, tend to be things that reconnect me to my natural self. So, for instance, going to bed shortly after it gets dark