A question to ponder over...
I’m taking part in a study group right now with Jovinna Chan, one of my yoga teacher trainers - as with many old friends, we've been fortunate to re-connect recently. I’ve loved taking her classes and the study group has been a great exercise in challenging my assumptions. I started out working with this question, thinking that ‘loving uncertainty’ was impossible and wondering how I could ever get comfortable with this idea. Some things seem insurmountable right now and yet we hope for (and believe) change is possible without knowing how we will get there. It's an interesting juxtaposition: the idea of loving uncertainty. There's the potential for difficulty and discomfort, which makes this something that doesn’t appeal to us innately. So I have found myself trying to look at it from a different angle and to challenge my habitual patterns.
I had an ‘aha’ moment as I hiked with my daughter and we talked about this question. She's an optimist and wise for her years and I love the time we spend together. As we talked, I realized that I already knew the answer to this question. The reason I can get comfortable with the concept of loving uncertainty is because the future may hold things that are hard for us, but it may also mean that unexpected, wonderful things show up for us. We can’t know ahead of time how it’s going to go, but we can stay open and make it more likely that we are awake for the wonderful things that come along and don’t miss them. By craving uncertainty, we're endeavoring to remove the wonder and magic of life. But if we can get comfortable with it, we’re strangely more open to the abundance of good things that come our way, rather than bracing against them. My father always advised me that for every potential concern for the future, you should think of an opposite positive outcome. I'm grateful to him for this framing although I don’t think I understood what this really meant until I started to look at it through the philosophy of yoga. He would smile… his advice fell on deaf ears as it so often did. He's no longer with us, but I hope he knows that he did get through to me eventually!
Of course this is an on-going struggle, but I’ve found myself noticing and observing my tendency to reach for certainty, a tendency which comes hand in hand with impatience. And I try to remind myself to slow down and accept that we aren’t in control of the world around us, but we can show up open-hearted and ready to play our part.
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