Living with uncertainty

I’m here to build something real.

Something impactful. Something that helps people live better lives.

Unsure what it is, I continue to search for the work that has true meaning for me.

And at the moment, I have a few opportunities to fulfill these desires.

Which one is the right one? I do not know. Perhaps I’ll never know. But they’re each exciting, intriguing, challenging, and full of unknown outcomes. And that; that’s seemingly what I’m looking for, because I’ve learned that anything worth doing is going to be riddled with uncertainty, and fully tow the line between the confidence required to tackle such opportunities, and the fear that boils inside when I realize I don’t quite know how things will go.

But that’s life, right?

We live our years, experience our days, and learn along the way. We gain new skills, explore new fields, and seek out whatever it is we want to grow into next. That’s just life.

We may not know how to do what we want to do, yet for some reason, if it’s the thing that calls us, we find ourselves compelled to take on new challenges, even in the face of adversity and uncertainty. Which is a beautifully natural thing, if you think about it.

Birds don’t know how to fly when they’re born, but eventually, they learn to take off. Tigers don’t know how to hunt and survive as cubs, but they learn by instinct paired with the experience of wandering with their pack. And humans don’t know how to do whatever it is that lies ahead of us, but we research, study, prepare, and then go out and attempt to do the thing we want to do, whether it’s building a table out of wood, designing an educational program, or transforming a neighborhood suffering from blight. We learn by doing, and continue to learn along the way.

Whatever it is we want to tackle, we each have the capabilities inside of us—we just need to learn how to access them, how to be patient with ourselves, and how to be resilient, adaptive, and honest.

It’s tough to create lasting change. I’m not really sure if I’ve done it. Yet I keep trying.

It’s tough to do things alone. I love working for myself, but I hate working by myself.

And it’s tough to embrace fear and uncertainty, but they’re necessary forces in life that we cannot escape, so we might as well learn to live with them.

And since we cannot rid ourselves of these basic tenets of life, perhaps the best thing we can do is to accept them as they are, and do what we can to become as comfortable as we possible living with fear and uncertainty.

This is wickedly easier said that done—trust me, I’m on my own journey to master these concepts and feel like I’m falling behind every day—yet will most certainly prove to be essential life skills for successfully coping with all the ups and downs life can throw our way.

So I encourage you, as I do for myself on the daily, to try letting go of the fear inside of you, along with the need to know the answers to everything you’re dealing with at the moment. That’s impossible, and will only lead to your suffering.

Instead, try embracing what you don’t know. Let yourself be content in the present state you’re in right now, instead of trying to solve the problems of the future that you don’t really know much about. And see what you can do to accept your fears and recognize the ambiguity of the future, and then tell yourself “it’s OK right now, I’ll figure things out in time.”

As a wise man once said, “all good things in all good time.”

And then make sure to remind me of this in the future, because I’m human just like you, and suffer daily from the debilitating effects of fear, uncertainty, and the need to know all the answers right now. ?