Uncertainty
Uncertainty can feel frightening. As if someone else is driving your car and you don’t know whether to trust their driving skills. More alarmingly, you have no clue where they are even taking you. It feels like we are out of control, like anything could happen, and we have no idea what. In that lack of control, we lose ourselves. Or so we feel.
During the U.S. election, there was a lot of uncertainty. Who will win? What will be the fate of the country? Will we turn to communism? Authoritarianism? What will those who’ve lost do? Will their rage fill the streets, gunpowder ablaze?
Now that the fate of the country has been conceded and Trump has been determined to be the winner, those who share in the anxiety around his presidency are uncertain about the future. Will he take certain rights away? Will he go after political enemies? Will he root out intelligence agencies? Will he listen to good advice or bad (or any)? Will he keep his election campaign promises? With states gaining more power under Trump, will people lose freedoms or gain some? Will he be able to handle the complicated geopolitical situation we face today, or will he make things worse with an isolationist stance? Will he leave office once his time is done? The anxiety is palatable amongst those who are less than enthusiastic about his presidency. He’s unpredictable.
And so is life.
We try to predict the outcomes. We try to plan for them. But ultimately all that we can consistently rely on is that we will get things wrong. Just as we’ve studied the map, the route changes. Just as we’ve learned to trust the driver, he slams the breaks and takes us on a jarring detour into the unknown.
We can’t prepare for the unknown. It has too many possibilities. In our minds, the potential outcomes we build seems scarier than reality. “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” wrote the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. But, sometimes, reality can turn out scarier than our imagination. The one thing we don’t think could possibly happen. The one thing we think we’re safe from…turns out to be the very thing that gets us.
This post isn’t really about political cycles. Elections come and go. But there’s a deeper undercurrent. At its core, life is unstable. Any sense of control is a mere illusion.
It doesn’t mean that we have zero say in the direction we take, or that we cannot reject getting into a car with a driver that our instinct tells us to avoid. But ultimately, we must recognize that there will be times where no matter our intentions, actions, feelings, and thoughts…we are but figures blown by the whims of the wind. Like that plastic bag in “American Beauty.” Life is beautiful. But it’s ugly too. Perhaps finding the beauty in that ugly gives us some reprieve, some meanings. But we must still reckon with the idea that our fate is not always in our hands and that we don’t know what comes next.
So the best we can do is look at what exists now. What know now. What we can do now. And live in that now. Moment to moment, breath to breath. The question: “What are the facts?” can help ground us. After all, what use is it ruminating on things beyond our control? “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters,” says Epictetus.
“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength,” said fellow stoic and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
We can’t always conquer or even avoid uncertainty. We can’t always grab the wheel. But we can learn how to embrace the ride.
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Reminds me of a good line from the 2021 film The Worst Person in the World: "I wasted so much time worrying about what could go wrong. But what did go wrong, was never the things I worried about."
I think a good mantra to repeat whenever i am stuck in the despair of uncertainty is to make your own certainties! What I mean is that when life feels out of control, we can think about what in our lives is by our definition, eternal.
Here are some of my examples:
-My family will always love and support me. Nobody will purposely abandon me (because I deserve to be loved and cherished)
-I will never give up (because people need me to be their champion and I need them)
-If I practice self-care, I will live healthfully for a long time (because science has found there is a strong correlation between self-care and a long life)
An annoyingly practical person might say this is yet another attempt to reassure myself, but I disagree. Maybe someone struggling with feeling out of control should remove the concept of control altogether. Sometimes thinking about what you can or cannot control causes you more anxiety since that way of thinking derives from the assumption that you will have to solve your problems completely alone, because control supposedly comes from inside you and you alone. But isn't that why you seek solace from people who love you, because they help you lift your burdens? What if instead of leaning heavily into the idea of nothing making sense since the world is so uncertain, we leaned into the idea of embracing the proof of how our lives do make sense? After all, we can’t wallow in uncertainty forever.