The Beauty of Uncertainty

By Don Arnoudse
Bio

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My 20 year-old daughter, Sara, was in full voice, speaking rapidly with both tension and inspiration. “Dad, there are so many things I want to do. I’m going to Spain in the fall, but I wish I were staying on campus [at the University of New Hampshire] so I can meet the presidential candidates before the primary. I don’t know at all where I’m going to live next spring. This summer, I’m interested in an internship in Washington, DC, but people tell me it’s a great time to be on campus. There’s another overnight leadership workshop next weekend, but I’m just not sure if I want to go again. I might want to take an extra semester before I graduate because there are so many courses I want to take and I’m running out of time. I feel like I should get a job and make some money, but I’m not sure how I would fit it all in. Everything is just so up in the air!”

After our discussion was over, I found myself thinking about the energy of the conversation. Sara was bemoaning her uncertainty in the face of so many choices. She was feeling the fear of, perhaps, making some wrong ones. She was hungry for life, with an appetite for tasting many things, but knew that not all of them were possible. She was exhilarated at the prospect of working in Washington, DC with a non-governmental agency that’s focused on serving Central America. Above all, what struck me most, in the middle of her complaints, was how fully alive she was!

As I near the end of my 50s, I am more conscious of how many messages I receive telling me that security, peace of mind and comfort should be my primary concerns at this stage of my life. I’m told that, in the elder stages, I should remove uncertainty from my life: I should live somewhere with well-established routines, preferably in an enclave of people my own age who will have similar concerns, predictable conversations and plenty of insurance to cover every conceivable risk. The ideal reward for my years of dealing with the vicissitudes of life? That would be a comfortable, smooth ride to the end with no unpleasant surprises.

But what if the key to staying vital and fully alive is just the opposite?

What if the key to growing older is to actually choose uncertainty? To consciously build surprises into one’s life. To vary the routines so that one is constantly being tested with new situations, having to make choices with imperfect data, to take risks based on one’s intuitions, to make requests of others because the situation requires expertise, experience and courage that are beyond one’s own reach. To wake up each morning not knowing just what that day will bring and welcome it all the same. To embrace the challenge of living fully as a useful exercise of one’s body, mind and spirit.

I want to feel all my emotions until I die: exhilaration and fear, calm and anxiety, shock and awe, love and repulsion, boldness and passivity, peace and confrontation. I want to experience both sun and shadow.

Above all, I want to live in gratitude for the beauty of uncertainty and its gift of fully engaging all of me in the great mystery of life.

Written by admin at Personal Empowerment

Tagged with: concerns emotion gratitude growing older routine uncertainty