
Eye (I)
In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much - how little - is within our power
Emily Dickinson (#1292)
Welcome dear readers,
I had planned to write this newsletter from Savannah, Georgia.
In a summer of traveling, a mother-daughter road trip to Savannah (where my daughter will start her junior year in college) was the last trip. I had anticipated furnishing her apartment, getting her settled, and seeing her new home in the South.
Instead, I’m writing this in Massachusetts, and Savannah has been evacuated in anticipation of Hurricane Dorian. With each new forecast, our travel plans keep changing, until I’ve finally had to admit that we can’t make firm plans. We have to wait and see. We’re in a state of uncertainty, of limbo.
All that uncertainty makes me uncomfortable. I’m a planner. I like scheduling things far in advance, of knowing that Y will happen after X. I’m the type of person who wants to finish up one thing before starting another, who wants to believe that life can happen in discrete units.
Uncertainty makes me aware of how little control I truly have.
I had envisioned myself, on that last trip of the summer, as the explorer, the devoted mother, the road trip playlist queen. In limbo, I am none of these. I’m my anxious, messy self, filled with concerns that I’m not good enough, that someone else would know how to make the best decision.
Uncertainty leaves us naked, stripped of our usual roles and defenses. It takes away the story we tell about ourselves. It leaves us without a center. Unlike the hurricane, whose energy is wrapped around its central eye, our “I” is left adrift. Without our usual roles, we are blind to our own selves.
But the longer I stay present within uncertainty, the more I can see that certainty itself is more diffuse, more amorphous than fixed. There’s a wobble in the etymology of certain. It can mean “without a doubt, determined, without question.” But it also means a quality of something the existence of which is a given but is itself undefined, unspecified. Think of phrases such as “a certain gentleman” or “at a certain hour.” These are coy phrases, hinting at something we might tacitly agree upon but don’t want to admit or deferring decision making until later. And when used as a pronoun, certain means “some but not all,” as in “certain of his shirts were red.”
That last makes sense, for certain’s proto-Indo-European root form, krei, means to sieve, to sort through, to distinguish.
Certainty isn’t a state of completion but a process. It is the act of sifting through. It is the act of composing our stories. And uncertainty is the pool of possibilities.
When we accept the relationship between vulnerability and composure, between uncertainty and certainty, we practice the embrace of contradiction – preparing for the journey and letting go of the outcome.
In our vulnerability, in our uncertainty, is our capacity to love without expectation, to be free of our own vanities, to see what is truly there in ourselves and others. And in our certainty is our capacity to practice what we can control – our choice to meet the world with curiosity, kindness, and love.
I still would prefer a set date for our road trip, clarity on the weather, some cosmic guarantee that everything will be all right – but I am finding it comforting to think of uncertainty, and all of its inherent messiness and vulnerability, as the life source of discernment.
Tell me of your uncertainties. Tell me of your hurricanes, interior and not.
Emily
*I’m fascinated by the fact that future Emily will know (or at least believes she will know) how this ends up. Looking at the past, we can see patterns emerge, but in the present moment, we are blinded by the uncertain future. For an interesting take on this, read Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel by Tim Urban. And what we already do know is that the Bahamas have been devastated by Hurricane Dorian.
** This idea comes from reading Lydia Davis’ story The Center of the Story, about a hurricane and the nature of storytelling. Here’s a snippet from it.
A woman has written a story that has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting. But in this story the hurricane threatens the city without actually striking it. The story is flat and even, just as the earth seems flat and even when a hurricane is advancing over it, and if she were to show it to a friend, the friend would probably say that, unlike a hurricane, this story has no center.
From The Center of the Story, Lydia Davis
***The relationship of certainty and uncertainty (and the process of constructing patterns) has parallels in both the spaghetti model of hurricane forecasting and chaos theory.