“Blackbird fly, into the light of a dark black night” -Paul McCartney

I stopped scrolling the other day for a Martha Beck quote:

“In the commerce of the soul,
worry can be traded for trust.”

Those words--generous, spine-tingling, and warm-- made me hold still a moment.  I’ve been carrying them around ever since.

My life feels pleasantly full and invigorating right now….it’s also riddled with uncertainty.

A loved one has cancer, now a later stage than we’d originally thought. This has me trying to bend the situation into one I feel good about by grasping for non-existent guarantees.

I am living a life I have chosen, spending long hours in creative play, and accompanying people who are working to grow and change their lives. This is a beautiful thing… unless it’s a day when I’m petrified of financial ruin and creative failure.

Maybe it’s the same in your life. Wonderful things, except you’ve been longing for a baby and it’s taking an excruciating amount of time and there’s nothing certain about what will happen or when.

Or, you are ready to find someone that you can navigate the rest of your life with but you just can’t control the timing or whether or how you find them.

Or, you’re currently pulled between the dream of divorce and the nightmare of it and neither choice feels like stable ground.

Or you absolutely hate your job, it’s stealing your life away 40 or 70 hours at a time, but what else could you do?

Uncertainty. Not being able to know or control how it’s all going to come out.

I’m all for adventure and spontaneity… unless I’m in the grips of uncertainty. In times like these, I for one would much prefer that my life be more like a novel I’ve read before. Skip the suspense, the twists and turns, the seeming gift that turns into misfortune that then turns back into a gift. I’d like to know, instead, now, how it turns out.

Sometimes I cling to that D.L. Doctorow quote, “driving at night in the fog, you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” He said this about writing, but it’s true of life too.

There’s strength in this approach, focusing our energy on the tiny scrap of what we can see, can know.

There’s also something important about turning to look outside the headlight beams to where we can’t see at all. This leaves us in a seemingly suspended state of not knowing. A state in which all we can do is hope, imagine, long for shapes in the distance.

When we’re feeling our way around in the dark, whether we’re ready to trust it or not,
whatever appears at our fingertips is an important piece of the puzzle. An important part of how our life will fit together when all is said and done.
Even if right now--with no larger picture available for reference--it just looks like an out-of-place, oddly shaped puzzle piece.

In the meantime, how beautiful it would be to let our guard down and relax into the wise words of adrienne maree brown who says that

“nothing is lost, it is lived”[1]

be it relationships, career paths, faiths, time.

***

If you’re looking for something to hold onto, some talisman, prayer beads in the dark, so am I.

I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman tells the real-life story of a man who wants to become a Buddhist monk. The man goes to the Kii Mountains in southern Japan where he is told by the abbot of the Mount Koya monastery that he needs to spend one hundred days alone in an unheated hut purifying himself three times each day with icy cold water.

At first this man tried “to recoil internally from the experience of the freezing water hitting his skin by thinking of something different—or else just trying, through an act of sheer will, not to feel the cold. […]

When it’s so unpleasant to stay focused on present experience, common sense would seem to suggest that mentally absenting yourself from the situation would moderate the pain.”[2]

However, after one hundred days of this, the monk in training slowly learns that when he stays present in the discomfort, it lessens.

When he didn’t look away but rather looked directly at what he was feeling, it wasn’t pain so much as sensation. Not something to suffer so much as something to experience. An emotionally chaotic, physically uncomfortable, seemingly pointless exercise that unfolded slowly inside of him into insight: don’t run away, stay here. An important part of his story. Not an inconsequential stage of the process to skip over or edit out when telling the tale of how he came to be himself.

A talisman protects you from something harmful. Prayer beads keep you in the present moment and connect you to the something larger that’s holding you. Which makes me think that uncertainty itself is the talisman, is the prayer beads.

When I look at uncertainty directly, roll it between my fingers, feel its contours in the dark, my fear dissipates. Ah yes, I don’t know, I can’t control how this turns out and I’ve been using all my oxygen to fight against this very realization.

Holding uncertainty close to my heart, I trust that it is itself an important experience. It is teaching me, again, that to find the next piece of the puzzle I must move by feeling rather than sight.

Trade my worry for trust.

[1] “I can’t stop being in the present” from Fables and Spells   by adrienne maree brown

[2] Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman pg 102