the continuum of the unknown

Recently, I have been reflecting on all the people I know affected by uncertainty, and I realise (gasp!) that this includes just about every living person on the planet.

Often, when someone is telling me about their uncertainty, fear comes up as an emotional bedfellow - the fear of what might happen in that void of the unknown. Uncertainty and fear have a way of blending together and becoming a kind of unconscious overdrive as to how we engage with life’s activities. It even may bring some form of stability by projecting what we think will happen, when we don't.

Deconstructed, uncertainty is nothing but the liminal space between the present and a future time. It is a not knowing the outcome. As a human being, we are ever in the process of becoming, for the duration of our lifespan. In other words, life is uncertain by its very nature. We live on the earth in space and time, and while the space element of life on this planet, gravity, is mainly stable, time is an ever-moving current that is more akin to a precarious negotiation, with one foot in the moment and the other always stepping into the next.

The future is undecided.



I have written before about the uncertainty of illness. When something goes awry in the body, the not knowing - of how long it will last, if it will heal or worsen, if it will lead to one’s demise - can be all-consuming and saturated with fear. Conversely, it can also simply be, as it is; it is all in the eye of the beholder. Why then, do we more often veer to fantasizing about the worst possible outcome, throwing us into the arms of fear? And, is the fear of death via illness so different than life’s other uncertainties?

People living with illness may argue yes, living with the uncertainty of chronic illness holds a direct relationship to the real possibility of death, ever more so when in the arms of a medicalised system that pokes, prods and does everything it can to remind you that some thing awful may very well come to pass.

On the other hand, with the uncertainty of war, poverty, abuse, hate acts, climate disaster, or the simple act of living on a planet swarming with threat, the playing field for the marriage of fear and uncertainty is broad as it is long. A rich tapestry of circumstances amplifies and distorts, yet death is not choosy; it comes for us all sooner or later.

If we are all living with uncertainty, how can we free ourselves from fear’s treacherous embrace, scared of our impending demise? Is it possible to be excited, dare I say revved-up about the unknown? If there is one thing I know about the peculiar marriage between fear and uncertainty, I know that the more it's fed by mental activity, the bigger it becomes, the more it engulfs and isolates.

I have spent a fair share of my time stuck in this space, and while I breathed and moved and ate and participated in life on some level, I was not wholly living. Rather, I became fixated on the ‘what-ifs’, projecting into a future of possible threat that allowed no room for presence.

As it turns out, the uncertainty and negative projection wasn’t the source of my pain, but it was found in the narrative running alongside it, littered with beliefs about myself. Those beliefs - that I am a failure, that I don’t belong - kept me in the fearful existence where I knew I was doomed. But, at least from that place, life was more certain. In some way, the beliefs that kept me small and in fear, at least kept me safe from embarrassment, from shame, from the possiblity of what might happen in the unknown.

The rocket-speed propulsion into the fear state is not the fault of the mind, alone. We all have a nervous system, and that nervous system is wired for survival. Fear (and anger) are emotional activators. These emotions are designed to bring our body online to fight, or to flee. When under percieved threat, our systems will do just about anything to keep us alive, including clinging tight to the emotion, and its physical sensations . Most beliefs form at a young age, and are adaptations to keep us alive in adverse circumstances. For a child, the experience of uncertainty, coupled with a lack of adult presence to create safety and reassurance, can be life threatening. Beliefs emerge as a reshaping of the narrative, to help to make sense our self in a world that is otherwise untenable. The problem is, those beliefs are often limiting and static, rather than dynamic, which is actually what is required for our iterative evolution. They hinder, rather than help us in the longer term, in continuum of the unknown.

Now, after a few years where my health has been in -and- out of stability, during a house project that has been anything but certain, I have arrived at a place of sometimes acceptance. A part of me has landed into the acknowledgement that this is the landscape of life. I tend toward understanding stability as an ever-changing negotiation, with some periods of time that are less anchored (what I now like to think of as ‘stretch’ moments), and other periods that pendulate naturally in a fluid balance, like a rythmic calm.

In retrospect, I see that none of the ‘awfulising’ that I clung onto (and still sometimes do) helped me to ride through the tough times, yet as a child, I have come to terms that it may have been the only tool I had for weathering the storm. Knowing this doesn’t fix or undo my adaptive patterns, but it does allow me the space to slow down, understand what is happening in my body and mind, and to make a choice in how I want to respond now. And in that space, there is possibility.

Between a stimulus and response, there is space. In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

-Victor Frankel