The Myth of Certainty

What is your relationship with uncertainty? Like a well-orchestrated square dance, uncertainty weaves the ring of our life with its favorite dance partner, discomfort. Some days, we are called to turn our back on it and “do- si- do.” Other days, we take hold of it and proudly “promenade.” Yet other days, we are invited to switch partners and have a joyful sashay with the comfort of certainty. But is certainty all that reliable? Does it serve us as well as we think? And does it not have its own flavor of discomfort?

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I am learning I have a rather unique relationship with uncertainty. I started my life in a home that held deeply guarded secrets. This was not an environment where information seeking was particularly encouraged. I also had a mother who enjoyed being needed, and developing self-agency and competency were not actively supported. It would be safe to say my childhood was a perpetual bath in uncertainty. It was all I knew.

In fact, I did not know that eliminating uncertainty was a laudable attribute until I went to school. It was there that I learned uncertainty carried not entirely pleasant consequences. Low scores, teacher disapproval and social sanctioning quickly mated my uncertainty with discomfort.

To be honest, straddling the messages I received about uncertainty was confusing. At home, my ‘not knowing’ was rewarded. Out in the world, my ‘not knowing’ was to be overcome. And for a young mind that had only the capacity to think in binary terms, I developed two distinctly contrasting relationships with it. One that embraced it and one that feared it.

In my early adult years, I worked with a mentor who recognized and identified a pattern in my behavior. She said, “You spend a lot of time trying to understand things…and the only reason you are doing that is because you think it will give you more control.” I resented her suggestion that I was a controlling individual, but her observation proved to be accurate. I did, in fact, spend a lot of time gathering information and mentally constructing strategies designed to circumvent undesirable circumstances, either real or imagined.

When acquiring my degree in social work, I had an educational supervisor who also spotted a pattern. One day with a rather stern tone she asserted, “Melissa, you are terribly concerned about your clients remaining comfortable. Don’t you know by now, discomfort is what spurs growth? Let them feel uncomfortable, they will find progress there.”  I will never forget her wisdom. Her delivery rattled my cage a bit, but her message hit my consciousness like an anvil.

The confluence of discomfort and uncertainty remained a consistent and confusing force in my life.

When my husband and I opened our art gallery and frame studio, I still believed in the myth of certainty and personal control. As I took the helm of a business that carried both a tremendous burden of responsibility and a high demand for decision making, I genuinely believed its success or failure in large part was dependent on what I knew and what I did with that information. It did not take long before I was drowning in forces well beyond me.

Government agencies demanded things with no room for negotiation. Without notice, road construction would begin and completely alter the accessibility of our location. Varying economic stressors emerged and altered people’s relationship with their budgets; quickly changing the frequency of their visits. Long-term clients would move, get sick or die. Oh, and then there was this silly little global pandemic. In every case, there was no certainty about the duration of these changes and if we could sustain their effects. Very quickly I learned placing myself in the seat of control was a fool’s errand.

The truth is many of the activities we participate in operate well outside of our personal influence. And no matter how much information we gather, and how many variables we try to change or move around, our relationship with certainty is fleeting, unreliable and ridiculously limited. To survive the level of uncertainty that filled my days, I quickly adopted the following quote as my personal mantra.

“If I understand, things are as they are. If I don’t understand, things are as they are.” 

It was not until I was in this station in life that I could fully understand the wisdom my earlier mentor was trying to convey. And in truth, this chapter of my life also taught me a great deal about discomfort. But not in the way you think. I learned trying to predict and plan for the future made me incredibly uncomfortable. But the pendulum was about to swing again.

Fast forward another 17 years…Ken and I now find ourselves at the end of a chapter. We have made the decision to walk away from the successful business that we had devoted so much of our time and talent into building. Ken was excited about his future and knew how he wanted to spend his time. Mine was completely uncharted territory. I thought embracing its uncertainty and entering it with no plan was a remarkably broad-minded choice.

Within no time at all, I felt utterly untethered, and had a ravenous need for certainty. With it came a particularly punitive and unhelpful inner critic that reprimanded me for such a reckless approach to my future. I tried to convince myself, the clarity would come and that I ought to enjoy all the things I was unable to do when our time was so consumed by the business.

It was in this liminal state, that I was introduced to the meditation practice of “not needing to know.”  Yes, it is a thing. My meditation teacher highlighted how we travel through life resistant to all the ways it makes us uncomfortable. He went on to explain how our nervous systems seek comfort and how our brains develop routines and scripts designed to minimize how long we feel on edge from uncertain conditions. The timing of this lesson felt a bit like a burr in my saddle, but what else did I have to lean into…? So…I practiced “not needing to know” and you will not believe what I discovered. I had spent over a quarter of a century in a career of “not needing to know.” 

As a picture framer, on any given day, I did not know who, or even if, someone would walk in with a project. In no way could I predict what type of project would come in. Nor could I know the condition of the item they wanted framed. I would not know the client’s aesthetic preference, budget or why it was even important for them to frame at all. In many ways, my 26-year career as a picture framer was a day-to-day commitment to uncertainty that could only be navigated with a well flexed muscle of curiosity.

Insisting on certainty and clutching to predetermined strategies greatly diminishes our access to a rare kind of wisdom and skillfulness that can only come in when we are willing to ‘not know.’ 

Although it is not related to framing, let me share an example of how this works. For years I have enjoyed a disciplined meditation practice and have had many conversations with people who are drawn to its benefits but who struggle with the practice. I was interested in helping people learn more about mindfulness and I became committed in finding ways to make personal awareness more accessible. Eventually, I developed a mindfulness curriculum that used works of art as a focus for the practice. I hosted a focus group to experiment with my initial concepts and eventually started teaching it through community education programs.

Naturally, as the date of my first class approached, a good bit of nerves and personal insecurity also arrived. To circumvent the discomfort of my uncertainty, I initially considered scripting my entire class and rehearsing it so I could present a seamless and self-assured delivery. But that was a lot of work, and, realistically, I did not have the time to do it. So, I created a rough outline of how I thought the material should be shared and went in both nervous but hopeful.

My first participant arrived early and quickly identified the room was too stuffy for her. She wanted to know “why I hadn’t created a more conducive environment for meditation?”  Eager to be responsive, I looked around the room for a thermostat, which of course, would not be available within a public venue. Instead of feeling responsible for her comfort in an environment I had no control over, I encouraged her to visit with staff and see if conditions could be altered to better fit her needs. She returned unsuccessful and perturbed. Too nervous to get involved, I allowed her to have her reaction. When the full roster of participants had eventually assembled, we started the class right on time.

Although all the participants would be guided through the same skill and viewing exercises, I designed the class so that each participant would be the sole viewer of an original work of art. This allowed each of them to focus on the shared skill they were learning, but to also recognize their experience would not be like anyone else’s. Because they could not compare their response to any other participant’s, they easily accepted their experience and were quite willing to share about it. This was not only helpful in creating active participation, but it also effectively illustrated how varied the responses could be while employing the same skill.

Within the first exercise, the same participant who had earlier struggled with the classroom conditions, suddenly stopped engaging with her piece and rather disruptively turned her body away from the artwork. After the exercise, I invited the participants to share about their experience, and because her response was so “big” I asked her to start us off. She proceeded to tell us how much she disliked the work of art.

Now, she happened to be sitting with one of my husband’s paintings and her comments landed in a tender place for me. But somehow, I was able to say, “This is great. Your experience shows us how we make rapid fire determinations about situations. Within seconds we often have concluded “I like this, I don’t like this, or I am indifferent to this.”  And once we learn that about ourselves, we begin to see choices beyond our initial reactivity. I asked her to tell us where she felt the dislike? She looked at me with a mixture of confusion and contempt and answered, “I don’t know, I just got irritated having to look at it.”  Again, I had a personal reaction, but asked her, “How did you know you were irritated? Was it a thought or a body sensation?”  Her reaction felt like a brick wall dropped between us.

I did not want the class to completely devolve, so I invited her to spend some time thinking about it and we could circle back to her. I then asked for other volunteers to share their experience. Conversation progressed and we managed our time well enough that we were able to navigate through each of the four skills, while reluctantly dragging our recalcitrant participant along with us. Despite her continued but subtle resistance throughout the balance of the class, overall, I felt like the class ran successfully. As I was loading my car at the end of the evening, I found myself so relieved that I had not endeavored to script the class. I knew if I had, my response to this participant would have been quite different.

There was no way I could have anticipated and planned for such a participant. As such, there would have been no room for her or me in the script. If I had come in with my ironclad plan, her presence would have flummoxed me, and I most assuredly would have become a combatant with the person who was challenging my seamless presentation. Instead, I was completely present and responsive. And I dare say, I am proud of what words found their way through me. Without the script, I had only one goal. I wanted to teach what I had learned about awareness and how, with practice, we could move through our lives with empowered responses. And I am proud that I found it within myself that evening.

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Why do I share my evolving relationship with uncertainty? Well, in my post entitled, “What Are You Looking For?”  I introduce the concept of conversational prospecting, and with it, I suggest we could enter our conversations as if we are metal detecting. I state detectorists have a healthy relationship with uncertainty and CHOOSE to be motivated by the promise of possibility. Much of this practice requires us to resist our insistence on certainty and to choose to replace it with curiosity. Both instincts exist within us, but one is derived from fear and hardwired to operate more readily. The other is less comfortable but holds far more possibility. 

Let me ask you this. If a detectorist were told there was an assured fortune to be found in a specific location and they received an approximate set of coordinates to find it, would they approach the landscape the same way they could if they were simply out exploring? Of course not.

Here is what would likely happen. They would plan to arrive early at the site, assuming they need to beat others who might have access to the same information. They would pull out their usual prospecting tools, but also use a navigating instrument to assist them in efficiently locating the coordinates. I suspect instead of initiating their detector and patiently and methodically moving across the terrain, as they would on a normal day out, they would travel quickly across land with one site in mind. It would not be until their proximity came close to the proposed coordinates that their detectors would even be employed. At this point, some might choose to approach the approximate site methodically. But there may be others who swing their mechanism erratically, hopeful the trove was substantial enough to alert quickly.

Now what happens if there is no alert? Some might check the coordinates to make sure they are in the right location. Others might just use that location as a starting point and simply broaden their sweep around it. Yet others might disregard their instruments, and simply start digging, relying solely on the information they received and a handheld honing device for refinement. Regardless of their chosen response, each started their search with a vastly different relationship with uncertainty.

If we played this example out further, it is possible the coordinates were completely wrong and someone, who knew nothing about this location, could be experiencing the find of a lifetime, only a few meters from where they each parked their cars.

Certainty would have completely hijacked their approach to the search. And the activities they usually enjoy would have been colored by and supplanted with frustration, disappointment, impatience, and exhaustion.

Hiding within the shadow of the unrelenting uncertainty of life are a myriad of gifts. Uncertainty is what allows us to make room for possibility. Uncertainty opens us to curiosity and motivates us to follow it with patience and persistence. Uncertainty fuels our drive and determination. Uncertainty puts us squarely in our five senses, alert and fully present. It is also what makes any success of discovery rewarding. And yes, uncertainty is also initially quite uncomfortable.

Although certainty feels much more comfortable.  It also closes us off to all that is present. It blunts our attention and limits what we allow ourselves to perceive. Certainty has no spaciousness or flexibility. And although we possess highly honed tools of perception, clinging to certainty limits our ability to trust them, especially when their feedback is not supporting the information we believe to be true.

Our conversations with each other are no different. If we enter with a personal agenda, or think our perspective is “right” we will travel efficiently over conversational terrain; often overlooking or overtly ignoring social cues that may alert us to something important about that individual. If we use social scripts and never listen to answers, it is no different than the detectorist who moved to the identified location but never turned on their detector. And worse yet, if we conclude something to be true about someone, without remaining receptive to the feedback being shared with us, we may never discover what is truly valuable.

Now it’s your turn, share with us an example of how your own certainty got in the way. Or tell us about your relationship with uncertainty and any changes you have recognized within your own life.