I’ve always been awful at living with uncertainty. I have never been able to be at peace with question marks — whenever my future looked unpredictable, my brain would race helplessly, trying to map out every eventuality that might occur. I have lain awake at night for hours (roused just as soon as my physical weariness was sufficiently relieved), working out my strategies if the sellers didn’t accept our offer, if the biopsy was bad news, if the college’s financial package wasn’t sufficient. Perhaps I only exhausted myself pointlessly, but having a plan felt like a comforting measure of control, whatever events might unfold.
But my current situation doesn’t seem particularly responsive to this sort of preparation. What good would it do me today to know that I’ll still be in wires a month or more from now? Quite to the contrary, it would be very discouraging! So, perhaps self-defensively, I’ve quit dwelling upon such distressing outcomes, and gratefully embrace uncertainty instead.
It occurs to me that I’m also dismissing positive outcomes (getting out of wires faster) — wouldn’t it be healthier to permit myself to hope? Not for me, not in this case. Yearning to end my current state arouses discontent. My hard-won, in-the-moment acceptance is undermined.
In most other life arenas, I’m fiercely results-oriented. I plan everything, from using up leftovers in the fridge to strategizing where to live in retirement. So it’s a great novelty to me to dwell calmly in this hazy, undefined frontier, without compulsively marching off to explore surrounding territories. It may be an unreproducible phenomenon, so I’ll enjoy this life-lesson while it lasts.
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