Finding Freedom: Navigating and Embracing Uncertainty
By now, I’ve gotten good at working with my Shadow friend. She’s animated and looks at life with a childlike wonder, but has tendencies that haven’t always been easy to live with. Shadow can look at life through a distorted lens, magnifying inconveniences and reacting disproportionately to worrisome or anxiety-inducing scenarios. Years of listening to her, talking with her, letting her know that negative situations don’t mean the end of the world, and pointing out when she may be reacting impulsively have kept her more or less in balance. But, every so often, the world doles out a problem she hasn’t seen before, or worse, maybe two or three at a time, and her old habits begin emerging again.
I’m proud of how far she’s come. She holds it together in situations that used to shake her, like public speaking. She’s far calmer now when faced with something that makes her angry. And she’s able to keep herself from sinking when feeling down. However, uncertainty is something that can still throw her for a loop.
Something like waiting for a medical test to come back can start off okay. It’s normal for something like that to be a little nerve-wracking. But as time goes on, I can feel Shadow start to shake. I watch her morph into different shapes, each one representing a different “what if” thought she has. What if they come back negative? What if the doctors tell me something’s wrong? What if we’re waiting here for days?!
Shadow’s reactions used to affect me. I’d suffer anxiety from the discomfort that uncertainty brings. But I’ve learned through the years that it’s normal to not know how things will turn out. No one knows with absolute certainty what a test result will bring, how someone will react to a gift, how your boss will respond to an email, how likely you are to get sick, what the best course of action in a situation is. And that’s perfectly okay to stay in the moment and take one step at a time. Being concerned about risk is healthy and keeps us out of dangerous situations and involved in advantageous ones. But when that concern becomes anxiety or fear is when it starts to work against us.
Shadow’s discomfort comes from the fact that she expected life in that moment to be black and white, but that’s not reflective of reality. Everything is risk, percentages, probabilities, spectrums. We live, day-to-day, in a grey area. Nothing can be known with certainty, and that’s a universality that everyone lives with. It’s crucial to the human condition. It is navigating that complexity that makes us able to capitalize on situations that we think may turn out okay and stay away from situations that won’t. And sometimes, we just don’t know, and that is perfectly okay. And when we find ourselves overly focused on the future, it is important to bring ourselves back to the moment.
I remind Shadow of this truth from time to time, and I see how it calms her. She is beginning to understand that, there are some things we just don’t know, and can’t know, and that’s just how it is. And although it’s healthy to be concerned about outcomes, it doesn’t help us to be worried about them. That won’t change the outcome, and it only acts to upset us.
In a year like this year, there’s so much that we don’t know on a personal level, and a lot that we can’t know just yet on a global level. Statistics seem to change on a daily basis, and as science and government both do their jobs, new discoveries and legislation change the ways we interact with the world. While things seem out of control and uncertain, the care that we can give to ourselves and others is within our control. Embracing that we are facing an uncertain time and understanding our limits and needs can keep us moving forward. To navigate the uncertainty, acceptance is a strategy we can use. Accepting that feeling discomfort is a part of the process, can help us tame our Shadow friends when not knowing starts to get to them. Deepak Chopra teaches us that when we practice detachment from outcomes, “in our willingness to accept uncertainty, solutions will spontaneously emerge out of the problem, out of the confusion, disorder and chaos. The more uncertain things seem to be, the more secure we will feel, because uncertainty is our path to freedom. Through the wisdom of uncertainty, we will find our security.”
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