Tag: Uncertainty

Don’t Run Out To Meet Your Suffering

Posted on by jabittan
I’m not sure what it is about American culture today, but we seem to be really good at worrying about almost everything. We fear lots of uncertainties and spend a lot of time uptight about things that might go wrong. While a  certain level of worry is ok, being what encourages us to use calendars, set reminders, and buy life insurance, we often slip into continual dread and fear that everything is going to crash.

 

“How often has the unexpected happened!” Writes Seneca in Letters from a Stoic, “How often has the expected never come to pass! And even though it is ordained to be, what does it avail to run out to meet your suffering?”

 

The first line of the quote above is where many of us seem  to live our lives, at least when we are dealing with fear and anxiety. We worry about the wrongs that could happen and about the misfortune that could strike at any moment. Ruminating in this state has the power to push us into depression, ruin our health, and deteriorate our relationships, potentially even bringing about the terrible outcomes we originally feared.

 

But that is not all of Seneca’s quote. What we believe is certain to happen often isn’t. What we predict won’t always come to pass, and while sometimes that may be a huge negative, there is no reason to live within that negativity before it has reached us. We shouldn’t run forward and live with what we fear will happen, or live with the fear the something we terrible will unexpectedly happen before it has. Don’t run out to meet your suffering.

 

Seneca continues, “Even bad fortune is fickle. Perhaps it will come, perhaps not; in the meantime it is not. So look forward to better things.” 

 

All we have in life is the current moment. We can generally anticipate the range of things that will happen in the next moment of our lives and we can build smart plans for the future, but we live in the here and now, not in the past and not in the future our minds are planning. The good that we hope for may play out, but things may also go poorly. If we constantly live ahead of our current moment, we will be distraught by the possible bad things that could happen. Seneca encourages us to remember that the good and the bad might not come, and that as a response we should lean toward being hopeful and use the current moment to try to shape a positive future. Don’t be stuck ruminating over the negative what-ifs of the future and ultimately ruin where you are right now.

Always Asking Questions

Posted on by jabittan
Questioning the world around us is part of what makes us human. Our search for answers and a better understanding of the universe is the story of human progress on Earth, and we must constantly ask questions and to find new answers to propel us forward. Often we never reach the answer we were hoping for, but we still ask questions and we still do our best to continue to understand what is taking place in the world around us.

 

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coats discusses how he learned to question the world, to truly strive to better understand the universe, by observing what took place around him and asking why.

 

“My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious” —as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as a ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.”

 

Recently I have been more aware of the answers people have to the frequent questions our world asks: Who should we elect, what is the nature of religion, how should we organize society to maximize human progress? Listening to the responses people have, it is clear to me that most people do not have answers, but instead have partial secondhand responses that they think they should defend. Most people do not live their lives in a constant state of questioning, and if they do, they seek out certainty to place themselves and their actions on the correct side of any given issue. Rather than inquiry and a deeper understanding, people pursue comfort and reaffirmation. This is clear in the simplistic shallow answers people offer to complex questions.

 

What Coats learned from his parents was to find his own answers. His parents pushed him to learn, to be aware of the world around him, to ask why, and to not accept the simple answers that people offered. His story shows why it is important to be constantly questioning what we know, why we know what we know, and whether our model of the universe is operating with the best information available. It is likely that we won’t find perfect answers, but that does not mean we should stop questioning or that we are on the wrong path because our knowledge is in one way or another incomplete. Recycling answers from someone else, especially secondhand answers that were never formed as complete thoughts, is dangerous and misleading. We fall into cycles where we fail to actually look for answers and build more complete understanding, and instead look past the answer given and find the response that seems to support our identity and the belief we want to hold about ourselves.

 

Our understanding of the universe should be nuanced because the universe, human interaction, and the organization of everything from atoms to people is complex. When we fall back on absolute answers and simple solutions, we are avoiding the nuanced and the challenging investigation of our planet. Easy and assuring answers are nice, but they do not aid human progress and they do not allow us to live in a state where we improve upon our knowledge and beliefs.

In Your 20s

Posted on by jabittan
I am currently 25 years-old and I have been working to find a solid path forward in my life. I feel that I have a lot of opportunity, but that I am being asked  to choose a path that somehow limits the direction I can travel. In his book, United, Senator Cory Booker sums up many of the feelings I have about my current point in life. He writes, “Your twenties are a decade without clear paths, as if you have been walking for a good while on a well-lit road and now it ends at a dark forest; there are hundreds of directions you could  take, none of them obviously right. Like many, I fond myself standing and staring, hoping for a sign.”
Booker describes the insecurities he felt as he went through law school and thought about the possibilities of his future. He described the challenges that he and his other classmates faced in preparing themselves for the next steps after college, especially when the next steps were not clear. It is reassuring to read Booker’s story and see that many people face the same challenges and insecurities that I go through. I am back in school after graduating with a degree in Spanish and Political Science, and I am pursuing a Masters in Public Administration at the University of Nevada. Despite a good job and the opportunity to pursue further education, feelings of insecurities and a pressure to have a clear plan still well up inside me.
The quote from Booker and his honesty about his fears helps me recognize that my doubts and worries are baseless. I am reminded of a quote from Colin Wright, “the fear of accidentally working too hard to get someplace we don’t want to be can be paralyzing, but it’s an irrational fear.” The message from Booker is to keep moving and be actively engaged in the world, and when we remember the quote from Wright, we see that we can let go of our fears of not ending up where we want to be. That type of fear is not based on the reality of our experiences, and is therefore, irrational. The important thing to remember during periods of doubt is that we are not alone in feeling insecure, and that our actions will ultimately open new doors if we have the courage to push forward through the forest of unclear choices.

An Irrational Fear

Posted on by jabittan
Colin Wright explores our mind and what happens when we work to be fully conscious of our world in his book Considerations. He explores topics related to self-awareness, motivation, and focus in his writing, and his book becomes something like a field guide for fortifying our mind and thoughts for the challenges of life. In his book, he addresses our fear of the future and our fear of spending time working hard for uncertain results. He writes, “the fear of accidentally working too hard to get someplace we don’t want to be can be paralyzing, but it’s an irrational fear.” When we take steps to grow and improve, doors will open for us, and our hard work will land us in places we could never have expected.

 

Wright uses this quote in a section exploring our growth and our ever evolving future. It is not always clear what opportunities will be presented to us and how we will have a chance to grow or benefit from those opportunities. We often have a desire to place ourselves on a path where our hard work can be clearly recognized and rewarded, but this almost never happens. Being flexible and allowing our lives to pivot gives us a greater ability to navigate the shifting path in front us, and gives us an opportunity to apply our hard work to receive benefits in the future, even if we don’t know what they will be.

 

I have struggled to remember Wright’s philosophy, but it has become even more important for me now. I am returning to college and face a potentially very  foggy path. If I act out of fear and make decisions to move forward based on my fear, then I will never fully apply myself, and I will never prepare myself for the uncertain path ahead of me.  By recognizing the uncertainty and at the same time fully engaging myself in my efforts, then I can be sure that my hard work will create new avenues for me. Combining that hard work with flexibility and a willingness to shift direction will ensure that I arrive in a place where I am satisfied with what I do, even if it was not where I originally aimed.