dear friend
a letter on navigating and befriending uncertainty
Today’s offering is a letter I wrote to a beloved friend. It is published here with her blessing, a few edits and the hope it may inspire others.
Dear Friend,
I read somewhere that the stuck places are portals. A statement which bothers me to too great a degree, but my deep knowing understands to be true.
What could I possibly say on being stuck that would redeem us from feeling it? What could speak to the breathlessness of finding ourselves in an impasse, a pool of mud so sticky, each manoeuvre becomes a threat to our very own existence?
Once you start listening to the gentle hum of your heart, the questions begin to unfold.
Is the flow of our vital energy hindered by the sense of terror generated by a confrontation with the unknown? Perhaps it’s the magnitude of uncertainty that intimidates us and thus renders movement unimaginable.
Do you ever contemplate the fact that we are inhabitants of this gigantic pebble floating in space, to which we are glued by a small, often unacknowledged, miracle called gravity? I often think of this planet we call both Earth and home, and how it exists in harmonious accord within the Solar System, a thing greater than our brain could ever compute and yet, still “a dot inside of a dot inside of a dot.”
An idea we could assert with confidence: it doesn’t end there, there’s more. So let us consider, what certainty do we hope to gather in this life?
Anyway, the terrestrial truth is that it often feels like we’re barely surviving at the mercy of fate, an incessant tornado which ruthlessly swallows this thing we are trying to mold into something decorous, acceptable and livable. Then, just when we think it can’t get any worse and are left with no choice but to beg for deserved respite, it is precisely in that moment that the scaffolding breaks down and any semblance of a worthy assemblage we had created is left to perish under the wreckage of our hopes and efforts.
I fixed myself a hot drink this morning and, as if I were in correspondence with the universe, the tea bag tag read: “infinity which is your unknown guarantees your happiness.” Now, I don’t know about happiness, but I would like to tell you, because it is my lived experience, that the bigger the nuisance, the larger the portal. There can be inspiration and healing in the tenderness of discomfort and pain; and this is where it all starts to acquire meaning. “I know there is medicine in knowing how much we don’t know,” writes poet Andrea Gibson. They add, “I know there are answers in being awestruck.” The radical openness and vulnerability we are cultivating, the nurturing of kinship with all the living, the care we bestow upon one another in spite of everything—or precisely because of it, this is what binds it all together and translates it into a life.
To be a student of uncertainty means to become privy to the spaciousness the not knowing breeds. As I write this letter to you, I remember a quote from Rebecca Solnit I had saved in my journal some time ago. She writes: “in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” The stickiness may begin to unravel after all.
I would like us to play a game and envision a life where our calculations down to the very minute details are fulfilled by the equation of the universe. What would happen then?
The truth is, you and I wouldn’t be friends. I wouldn’t have acquainted myself with the crows and the crabs and the moon. I wouldn’t look up to the sky with the eyes of a fool in love with this beautiful, strange and mysterious world. I wouldn’t be here today, writing these words to you, as I attempt to clutch my heart tightly enough so that it may not burst from the bubbling gratitude I feel for having crossed paths with the extraordinary human beings I get to call friends and also for “just being alive, on this fresh morning, in the broken world”.
It’s an interesting game to play, this one. Interesting, and, admittedly, petrifying.
What if I told you that “when you don’t know what is next, you enter the realm of infinite potential?” And isn’t this potential akin to the golden alchemy only uncertainty can conjure? The beautiful occurrence of “one molecule saying yes to another molecule” and the irises were born.
I hope you won’t wish me any ill for this invitation, which I would like to extend to you but also to myself (daily).
May we open ourselves up to uncertainty,
may we welcome a practice of grounding amid groundlessness (like surfers riding the ocean’s waves),
may we dwell in the not knowing and surrender to it, not passively
but wisely, lovingly.
With love and in friendship,
Shirin
Thank you