Embracing Uncertainty: How to Find Growth in Life’s Unpredictability

Certainty versus uncertainty. It’s the ying and the yang of our psyche. We all crave certainty or perhaps it’s control? Yet in reality, every single one of us faces uncertainty every single day.

Certainty is an illusion (unless of course we are referring to death and taxes!). We wake thinking we’ve certainty in our day. We’ve plans, diaries, goals, places to be, things to do, schedules, lists, mental checklists, whatever works, it’s a personal choice. We use these to comfort ourselves, perhaps without even knowing it, that by noting these things literally or mentally we’re building certainty in our day.

Yet whilst we might have a degree of certainty of action, we rarely have certainty of outcome. We kid ourselves we do, yet life is a wonderfully eclectic mix of often unforeseen, perhaps unexplained events that lead us all to often on a path that when we awoke that morning we might never have imagined.

So yes plan, mitigate risk, write lists, keep a schedule, do whatever works for you. Just know that we all, without exception, are at the mercy of events that are entirely outside of our control. Therein lies the wonder and beauty and mystery of it all.