“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” –Ursula K Le Guin
“Creative minds exist to disrupt this false peace and force people to face reality” –James Baldwin.
“To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” –E.E. Cummings
“Certainty” has been drilled in us as the preferred goal in Western education and industrialism. It permeates our media, politics, and marketing strategies. It is the root cause of those seeking power and the source of unresolved interrelational conflicts. Intimacy is the infinite ways to navigate the complexity of our everyday relationships. It covers the tending to the needs of others through empathy, altruism, and beyond superficial friendships.
Our Lives Can Change By Exploring New Possibilities
How would it be, for instance, if we created a different emphasis in our culture? Nora Bateson poses the question: what if we change “proving to learning from each other”? If we consider this profound change, we are opening the door to infinite contexts that are beyond mere content. It is terrain more than any map of certainty can depict. It encourages novel possibilities of interaction that can bring our hidden needs to the surface and mutually share how our commonalities are also uniquely different, yet worth sharing, as nature does to balance its simultaneous messy and beautiful existence.
If this is experienced in that space between us, those natural pauses that bring up the depth of our humanity, the more our lives will respond differently. Bertrand Russell insisted that the key to a fulfilling life is to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
Models and absolute goals cannot attain this blending with others. They impose uniformity at the expense of the many random joys and sorrows that can be taught amongst each other. This avoids rubber-stamping what the correct way to live is, which we now know produces an emotional quilt by not meeting imposed standards. This is prevalent in mandates and how-to books regarding traditional schooling, parenting, grooming, etc.
Thomas Merton believed that spiritual growth and self-actualization require moving past rigid dogmatic formulas to embrace the mystery, vulnerability, and darkness of our relationships. The word “Sfumato,” pointed out recently by Maria Popovo in her Marginalian newsletter, is an Italian Renaissance painting technique that blurred the edges of colors and tones so they transition smoothly without harsh lines. This is a great metaphor for breaking the binds that “certainty” and other cause-and-effect pressures produce by making way for our unique contributions to evolve into the infinite emergence of possibilities.
The Process of Creativity Is Our Hope for the Future
Certainty blinds us from seeing how we are all interdependent. It is hard to see how the whole of our complexity is more than what part we play in maintaining our connections to all that occurs in our social/environmental multi-contextual existence. Yet when we step outside of the cultural constraints that maintain this narrow perspective, the intuitive nature of our yearning to create is unstoppable. It is as Michelangelo would describe the dirty slabs of marble that he carted to his studio, saying to those who made fun of him that there is a beautiful statue in here. It is seeing the landscape from a single grain of sand, as William Blake poetically expressed, or Walt Whitman believing that a “leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”
Although accepting certainty indoctrinates us into the temptation of a false sense of security, the outcome produces many stress factors associated with emotional problems that can be resolved through experiencing the creative nuances of life. Rebecca Solnit believes that not depending on prepackaged solutions creates a tolerance towards “…ambiguity and reframing unpredictability as a manageable asset rather than a threat.”
This is further underscored by Ursula K Le Guin, who advocated that “uncertainty drives us forward. The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.”
Prompts to Encourage Mutual Learning and Understanding the Needs of Others
Relationships Essential Reads
Have you ever had trouble conforming, and what fears were associated with that pressure?
What does Nora Bateson mean when she says, “What gives her hope is to go where there is none and see the creative process take place”?
What would occur in your life if a difference that made a difference did not have the pressure of certainty?
How would Ursula K Le Guin’s quote of “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. Create changes in your everyday activities”?
How would your relationships and intimacy be different if you decided not to spend your life demanding clarity from the future?
What are you missing by not understanding what is in between you and another when in relationships?
How would you feel accepting that life has simultaneous contexts and many truths at the same time rather than certainty? Write a short poem to share about how this feeling can become part of your everyday life.
In what ways will you feel different if you go beyond perceiving absolute truths and allow for the infinite possibilities of our human potential to be accepted?
How do you interpret Martin Buber’s most famous quote, “All real life is meeting and that most ideas rely on high probability rather than absolute proof “?
In what ways can you describe the many contexts of intimacy?
How can solutions to problems tolerate ambiguity and reframing unpredictability rather than being a threat?
