Friends with uncertainty

I hate uncertainty.

That's a confession, not a defensive declaration of stubborn intent.

I'm coming to understand better what that means to me as I work through things, confusing moments, with Ann Marie. Moving from dependence to independence to interdependence, moving from certainty that leaves so much unspoken and unrevealed, hurtfully so, to uncertainty that is open and genuine and hopeful, is an incredibly healthy-feeling process, but also a very, very scary one.

Look at our world, full of contracts, bindings, insurance, all meant to externally enforce certainty. Which none of them do--all they do is create different reactions to uncertainty when it happens, which it does.

It kind of hurts even thinking or writing about this, because I want to feel something, to have something and someone in my life, that I can count on. That I can absolutely trust with my heart and feel, "this I know." And to think of everything in life being uncertain feels like saying that I can't have that, that everything is transient and unobtainable. That I am unsafe, in danger.

And in a sense, of course, it is that way, because we all die, we all get old, we all keep growing and changing. But it seems that a connection to something I can really believe in is my rock in life. It frees me, it fuels me, it inspires me, it gives meaning. How can I acknowledge that without fearing uncertainty?

What I'm starting to realize is that I've been taking the wrong path to what I've needed all this time. It has something to do with what I mentioned in an earlier post, when I spoke of Ann Marie telling me I respond to crises by resisting change. Part of that is equating change with uncertainty, and uncertainty with loss.

And that last part may be the key. I capture a certainty, and then lock it away and keep it hidden from the world, hidden from my heart, which can't bear the thought of something changing into loss. It explains a lot about how I've handled separation from AM in the past, approaching it without even realizing I was doing it as a sort of life on pause, or life frozen, or life on hold, and our communication would become two spectators of our shared life, sitting on the sidelines, and I felt of life that it was something that would happen later, something to come after riding out or waiting out the present moment of uncertainty, which was most certainly not part of any life I wanted anything to do with.

What I'm starting to see isn't some detached, easy-come-easy-go, let-life-do-whatever-it-wants-and-don't-care reaction to that fearful notion of uncertainty. I think too much equivocation can be poisonous to real depth of connection in life. Instead, what I'm starting to see is the potential for a wholly different approach to creating lasting, growing, dependable realities in life. Not one that struggles and emerges with a frozen statue of certainty, then plants it in the town square and lets it rot. But one that's based on the intentional and specific application of hope, of imagination, of willingness, of openness, a kind of certainty that is only as certain as the present moment, and yet is strong and deep and count-on-able as anything we could hope for.

I believe in commitment. I believe in things that last. I believe in certainty. But it requires being friends with uncertainty, and renewing that friendship every day, remaking and renewing and re-loving what I want to make permanent, lasting. Permanence not as stasis, but constant re-creation.

Maybe that's what all this rambling points to. Seeing that life is only a series of moments, but that we have the choice of how those moments take shape. We can dissipate them, through disconnection or through superficial skimming. Or we can guide them, knit them together, make them into an ongoing series of deepening, bonding, nurturing, building moments, chapters of a greater story, one that's precisely as certain as we make it. Which can be absolutely, or not at all. It's in our hands.

It's still touchy for me. It still hits a nerve that's directly connected to my fear center. Part of me doesn't want to let go of any certainty, however lifeless and anti-life it is. But the uncertainty-certainty--that gives me more power than does any objective control over something. It's the power to choose something profound, again and again and again, and delight in its growth. That's the greatest power we have. It will take work for me to believe in that hope enough to start really basing my life on it. Its potential is daunting, but exciting.