Embracing Uncertainty In An Age Filled With It
By: Jake Lyda
Tags: Life Lessons, Letting Go, Life, Uncertainty, Peace

Embracing Uncertainty In An Age Filled With It

Uncertainty is downright terrifying, right?

Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash

Uncertainty is downright terrifying, right? I mean, what can you do with it? Planning goes out the window, you don’t have all the information to make a solid decision, and you swim in a sea of anxiety and fear.

So…not good.

And this year has exacerbated this fear. Every day, the news blindsides us with the latest unexpected tragedy. We consume it with an air of “of course this happened. Why wouldn’t it?”

However, this is nothing if not natural. Our mind craves the opposite of the current uncertain reality, which is certainty. The brain’s #1 job, according to psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, “is making these guesses, and then comparing them to sense data from your body and from the world that is continually arriving, as a way of reducing uncertainty, which, it turns out, is the metabolically efficient thing to do.”

It’s metabolically efficient to reduce uncertainty, but in a world that’s filled with it, how much can we reduce before we run out of gas?

I find that there is a much better solution…

Let Go and Sink

I recently went through a cacao ceremony (definitely recommend for literally everyone in the world). In this particular session, I was invited to go into the ocean. Past my knees, past my hips. Oh, what the heck, fully submerge myself into the murky depths.

At first, it was rather intimidating staying underneath the waves. I was told to stay under, to feel what it felt like. I’m someone who doesn’t normally experience anxiety, but oh boy, I fully felt it in that moment. It was so murky and uncertain.

However, once I felt the anxiety and made my peace with it, I relaxed into the sea. It was an ease beyond belief. Like sighing over and over and over, being okay with the murkiness of the ocean.

Then I went up to the surface. What I found was shocking: Millions of people were trying their damndest to stay afloat, to not sink into the scary depths. Treading water, treading water. Furiously kicking their legs and floundering their arms. Just doing whatever they can to not even look at the uncertainty underneath.

I realized that I had been once of the millions for so long. Unwilling (or even unable) to let go and allow myself to be immersed in the unknown, in the murkiness. But once I did, once I felt the unease around sinking into uncertainty, and then let that feeling go, I found bliss and ease and breath on the other side.

Hope For the Future

What was cool is that my imagination didn’t stop there. I went back down into the middle of the ocean, sinking gently to the bottom, content with the murkiness and the not-knowing. Next, one by one, people started to let go and come down with me.

This, in my opinion, is a glimpse of the near future. As the pandemic and politics and public injustice rolls along, people will either get too fatigued or fed up and decide to make a change. That change is to EMBRACE the fact that none of us have any idea what’s going to happen. Despite our brains being these big prediction machines, our consciousness — that is, our soul, our essence, our connection to Source — is not. This is who we actually are. The brain is merely a tool that’s taken over, having us furiously tread water.

In the near future, we all will let go. We all will realize that much of the things we worry about are outside of our control. What we can control, what we are certain of, is that we’re in control of our reactions to events, circumstances, and conditions. We have the ability to be at peace with the current moment. We don’t have to agree, but we can still be at peace and at ease. We can breathe deeply and be still. And one by one, we can rediscover that we are whole NOW, we can heal ourselves NOW, we can be okay NOW.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

When You Stop Fighting Uncertainty, You Befriend It

Everyone eventually came down into the depths, finding their peace with uncertainty. Sure, it’d be nice to know for certain when this “pandemic” will be over. But the reality is we don’t know. And once you’re at peace with that not knowing, when you can sit in the murky depths and not wig out, that’s when the pandemic will end for you, personally. You will no longer find fear keeping your head above water. You sink into the depths with calmness and clarity, not allowing the fear of media and groupthink to keep you fatigued and scared.

Sure, it’d be nice to have all the injustice in the world eradicated. But we don’t know if and when that will happen; that’s reality. Once we can be at peace with this reality, then we can let go and decide to react in a positive way, to be healthy and act healthy towards others in our own way, and to set a solid example of how to exist in a communal, kind presence.

With 2020 giving us a virus, political unrest, an explosion or two, war, racial violence, and motherfucking murder hornets, it seems like the only certain thing is uncertainty. So find a semblance of comfort in that uncertainty. Welcome it into your arms, find space for the fact that nobody knows what’s going to happen. Hell, most of us don’t know what’s happening right now. So if we can calm our minds and shut the tool off for a second, our Soul, our consciousness can remember that we actually exist in the murky depths, and that we can be our own guiding light.

Millions of Stars

That’s what the end of my ceremony showed me: Millions of individuals, embracing the uncertainty, coming down to the bottom to find peace within the world, and shining like endless stars in the sky. It was beautiful, and it will be beautiful. One by one, we become our lodestar, our lampholder to navigate the uncertainty. And then, one step at a time, we enter a state of alignment and enlightenment.

And when there are millions of stars in the murky depths, it’s almost as if there’s no murk at all. The ocean is too bright with everyone following their unique path, at peace with the uncertainty surrounding. As guiding lights, we keep our focus on our own next step, our own next challenge that we tackle with confidence and faith, bringing us ever closer to a peaceful, compassionate, wonderful world.

Will this be the definitive future? I’m uncertain.

But I’m okay with that.