The Uncertainty in Life
What is uncertainty, how to deal with it and how to build the life we want.
Spiral Of Thoughts
It’s 2 am, I woke up sweating, the room was dark, and very silent I could even hear my inner thoughts “god why is it so hot in here”, “I’m thirsty”, “how did Pique cheat on Shakira”, “am I ever going to leave this country?”, “can I ever achieve my dreams?”, “what’s that? Did I just see a ghost?” the thoughts kept spiraling. I went to the kitchen to drink some water, the water tasted splendidly beautiful, I guess I was really thirsty. It turned out that the electricity was cut, “how could someone do that at such a time?”, “I miss her, but she was bad to me”, “how can I know what’s and who’s right for me?” the thoughts kept spiraling. I went back to bed, decided to use my phone and scroll through twitter, “damn this girl is beautiful”, “how does Khalid Saad know everything?” “hahaha that’s a funny meme”, “why are they criticizing him for crying when he saw his pride? I’ll be crying a river when I marry the love of my life”, “one day I’ll be at this place too, one day” the thoughts kept spiraling. I closed my phone, looked up, there’s nothing to look up to, it’s dark, so I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath, “what should I do first thing at the morning?”, “I hate being here, I can’t fulfill myself”, “how can I be sure that I’ll achieve what I want”, “love, love, love, what do I know about love? Nothing”, “confidence is the food of the wise, but the liquor of the fool”, “I am uncertain of my life”, “that shall all pass” the thoughts kept spiraling. I slept.
At that night, I was overwhelmed with uncertainty and I almost had a quarter-life crisis. Living in a country like Sudan, where randomness and complete unpredictability rules everything, it makes it really hard to have a stable and optimistic mind, and more worryingly, you become uncertain, of everything, just as I was that night. Luckily enough, there’s an antidote of uncertainty and we can actually overcome it. In this article I’ll be addressing uncertainty in a deep level trying to understand its nature, and we will learn ways to tackle and deal with it.
The Treasure In The Forest
The most important function of this highly developed and utterly complex machine that we call the ‘brain’ is to ‘predict the future’. The utility of this function is that it enables us to reach to our goals safely and in the best and most favorable way. We can roughly say that we predict the future by the following steps: 1) recalling our past experiences and extracting values from them 2) accumulating and assembling information about our current state of being and the nature of our surroundings 3) imagining multiple scenarios of behaviors of conduct to reach to the goal and choose the most suitable and applicable one. We can only proceed and navigate through these steps perfectly in the presence of a crucial element, which is ‘certainty’. Certainty is a subjective and internal state of knowing what the upcoming events will be like, how are they going to present themselves and when is that going to happen. This information helps us to organize our thoughts and behaviors in a way that align with the goal we’re attending to. If your goal is like a hidden treasure in a forest, then ‘certainty’ is like the weather is nice, sunny and you have a map of the forest within your hands that could lead you to the treasure. Uncertainty on the other hand, is like not having this map and adding to that, the forest is dark and vague, and the weather is murky and you can’t see anything ahead because of the fog. Uncertainty is an internal state of not knowing what comes ahead, and it diminishes our efficiency in conducting the aforementioned steps to predict the future.
The thing is, Life by itself is naturally uncertain, we waste our cleverness and resources in trying design Life in the most neat, organized and predictable form we could possibly produce, not knowing or willfully blinding ourselves from the fact, that life is exactly like water, you can’t force it into a specific, stable and controlled form. You can’t be sure of anything and you can’t force things to act in your favor, specially, here in Sudan, you can’t even plan two hours ahead. When we don’t accept the normal state of uncertainty or we’re overly and obsessively too aware of it or it’s beyond of our tolerance, we fall into anxiety, fear and depression. We become pessimistic about what lies ahead and we fear to learn and develop. We lose hope and the pain of today swallows us, forcing us to become irrational in decision making and impulsive in our emotions. Therefore, we need to learn how to deal with this fundamental aspect of being, and how not to let it to intoxicate us.
The 5 Freeing Rules
Let me present to you five articulated rules that I carefully wrote and cohered. Following them will be a grand start to build a life that can tolerate and tame uncertainty, and they could also give you a space to spread your wings and breath.
1. Ground yourself in the present, live it and embrace it:
We as humans are happy with our lives as long as there is a tomorrow to aspire, as long as there’s a future to cling to, a good, optimistic and beautiful future. A good tomorrow that could anesthetize us from the pain and fear we live today. The interesting thing is, once this “good tomorrow’ arrives to our doorsteps, we anxiously don’t enjoy it fully, we don’t embrace it, live it and fully experience it unless, and only unless that there’s an absolute guarantee and an implicit certainty that this ‘goodness’ would last forever, and that there will be more to come.
In this way we’re just chasing an illusion, forgetting where we are at the moment, blinded from all the possible and already presented beauty and goodness, disconnected and squashed within ourselves with no true sense of our surroundings. By that, we miss the chance of catching the hidden immense beauty of being and of the people around us. Live your present, eat like it’s your last meal, have your walk like it’s your last, talk with your loved ones like it’s the last time and do what you love like it’s the last time. Of course you need to plan for the future and chase your goals, but while you’re doing that, don’t forget that you only have the present that you can live in, it’s only and only the present that in your disposal.
2. Stop the continuous seek for pleasure, it’s a toxic addiction:
To run away from our anxiety, burden of being and pain, we panickly and uncontrollably seek for pleasures to distract us, and since we deep down know that they’re brief and uncertain, we want them all, we want every single pleasure that could come in hand. We fear to miss out any of them, so we continuously and infinitely seek for them, and on top of all of that, we want these pleasures to be condensed and accumulated in that short, limited timeframe of being that is called ‘life’. So, we become addicted, we flip greedily from one pleasure to another, and we a call a life full of pleasures a ‘high standard of living’. In this modern life, to keep up with this ‘standard’, we must pay the price and oblige ourselves to work harshly and more than ever, a work that could be a pure source of boredom and exhaustion but we still do it to afford our pleasures. We seek relief from such work by intervals of expensive and violent pleasures to stimulate our senses and numb us from the anxiety and pain, and as Watts said, we call these intervals “real living” and we make them the justification of our continuous work. We need to stop that, this addiction to pleasure will make us more sensitive and hypervigilant to uncertainty. In return, we will fall deeper and deeper into resentment of life, anxiety, depression and self-loath.
3. Stop the avoidance behavior, face your pain and your problems and go through them:
The more we’re avoiding pain, the more we’re exposed to it. We nervously and systematically run towards and seek for pleasure, believing it’s the only way to get rid of the pain and the only way to live in comfort. While actually, the only way to run away from pain is through it and the only way to exclude the pain is to embrace it, as it’s the only way to float on water is to sink, as Bukowski stressed, the only way to try is not to try and in meditation, the only way to do that is not to meditate, you don’t force yourself to stop thinking (since meditation is clearing your mind and decreasing t’s activity), it’s quite the contrary, you think but you observe your thoughts carefully, you just look at them without giving a reaction. Don’t avoid, be an active participant in your life, I mean it’s ‘your’ life. When you don’t avoid, you don’t give a room for uncertainty to freeze you and scare you. You’re the captain of your own ship, you take care of this ship and you be careful of its path through the ocean, not worrying about uncertainty because your ship is ready, alert and stabled in its present.
4. Have an open mind, don’t be fixed:
Since life is unpredictable and the ground is always shifting, the wisest thing to do, is to be adaptable and flexible. Don’t be stubborn and attached to certain ideas and beliefs. Beliefs are essential and useful in guiding you through your life and in adopting ethics and values, but at a certain level, beliefs could be really dangerous, because to believe in something means you’re fixating your dynamics of thinking and enclosing the vision of your mind in a way that serves and empowers the thing you’re believing in. Therefore, when uncertainty lurks in and life practices its unpredictability, a stubborn believer will be committing suicide by not allowing his mind to reorganize and open itself to new thoughts that will help him to survive this shifting and sudden wave of uncertainty. It’s like you’re sailing your ship through a path, but there’s an iceberg occluding it, you’re refusing to choose another new path, because this path is the one that you’re always used to go through it, it’s the only path you’ve ever known, and ever will. You will end up hitting that iceberg and your ship will sink.
5. Have a north star, a goal that will guide you when you’re lost:
The psychologist Adolf Adler stressed a vital point that we need to grasp in order to understand the importance of a goal, he said: “The psychic life of man is determined by his goal. No human being can think, feel, will, dream, without these activities being determined, continued, modified and directed toward an ever-present objective”. A goal is what keeps us alive, it gives us meaning and stability. When you don’t have a goal, the wave of uncertainty will come at you with its full strength and wash off all your well being and mental stability. When you have an actual goal, it going to work as an anchor, it will stabilize you well when the wave of uncertainty comes in. A goal acts like a north star too, it helps in modifying and altering your behaviors in a good manner, it guides you towards the right direction when you’re lost and overwhelmed with uncertainty.
A north star doesn’t have to be something specified; it also doesn’t have to be a one north star. For me, I have two north stars. A personal north star which is to reach my potential in writing, storytelling and educating and a career north star which is to use my existing skills, enhance them, develop more skills and invest them all in improving my field. It doesn’t have to be fixed, maybe a year later I’ll have a totally different stars or maybe I’ll add a third north star. What matters is just having a north star! No matter how simple or underdeveloped it is, you need to have one. Don’t move through life with no sense of direction. Explore yourself and your options and actively search for a north star. If you already have a north star, share it with us.
The Door To The Mind Should Only Open From The Heart
Allow me to finish this article with a beautiful poem called “This Morning I Pray For My Enemies” by Joy Harjo. It reminds us that in this world of uncertainty, no matter how much logic you try to apply in this life, only the heart can give you the last call.
And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the questions, and not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.
This is the most beautiful , genuine and artistic my eyes see it today , Thank you for this and Keep Going , Much Love :)
u have chose the words that only feelings can show it , nice article mashallah and keep going ❤️❤️