Stop Needing So Much Certainty!
To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know.¹
No one human being, on the whole of this Earth, has all the answers. Those that assert with certainty that they have the one truth:
Run far away from them.
The world is complex, and filled with seemingly infinite possibilities for life. This is scary for a lot of people. Understandably so! Wouldn’t life be so easy if we were always just told exactly what was right, exactly the formula or the recipe that would lead to a happy and fulfilling life. Life would become even more effortless if such a hypothetical prescription worked for anyone and everyone.
When someone comes along with what they shout from the mountaintops being “the answer,” many are subconsciously drawn to that person. Life prior was a blank wall in your home. You haven’t decorated because once you decorate, you don’t want to go to all the effort of having to go back and change it if you don’t like how it actually looks! What if people come over for a party and they don’t like what’s on your wall? We become paralyzed by indecision, and in response some of us just stare at that blank wall with anxiety, unable to do anything at all, and others rush to fill the wall with anything and everything, and relief floods over them having finally made some kind of decision. But even better: imagine someone who claims to be the best interior decorator in all the world comes to your home, and they say “This is exactly what you put on the wall. Trust me. Everything is fine now.”
The blankness of life is gone. You can finally breathe with your newfound identity, with your newfound truth placed tightly against your heart.
But, you know. You know that the wall, beneath anything that could ever be imposed upon it, will always be blank. That interior decorator’s designs can never become the wall itself. The anxiety remains, and begins to swell as you deep down realize that you allowed someone else to decorate for you, to color your life, when before, the possibilities for what your life could be were as limitless as the imagination.
The possible solution?
I think we just need to become okay with the possibilities, the uncertainty, and all the doubts that this life brings. Be at peace with the blankness of the “wall of reality.” There is a power in that, the power of the moment before creation, before action, when anything can become your reality. Own that power.
One day, after enough listening to yourself, you may begin to fill life up with what you have discovered to be true. Leave your neighbors’ walls alone.
[1]: Educated (2018) by Tara Westover, pg. 197
