Uncertainty.
It has always been a good topic regardless of the fact it’s expressed in a therapy room or in your day to day life. In my opinion it is one of the most challenging subjects. As people, most of us are focused on the certainty of things and situations. Many of our efforts go into that direction: making sure the decisions we make will give us a certain outcome. Nothing to blame in that. What we don’t know is how to deal with things that seem uncertain and mainly I am talking here about things we project in our future: will I ever get that job that I really want? Will I have a family, a husband or a wife who will love and appreciate me? Will I have people around me that would care for me beyond my skills and abilities? Will I… ? Will I… ?
I will be honest with you and tell you that we all struggle with uncertainty. We go through life, we face challenges, we overcome them. We stand on the top of the mountain and out of nowhere, apparently, fear takes a toll on us and starts whispering some little doubts. That does shake the clarity and security of our inner world, doesn’t it? In that moment you feel it’s easier to deal with anything else but doubt and uncertainty. You try to fight against it, find reasonable arguments and escape it which is kind of understandable. Why? Because we are never thought by parents, carers, teachers, authority figures how to deal with uncertainty. Our society portrays this image of happy, security, confident people when we all know that is so unreal. It is a struggle to try most of the times to get to a secure point in your life and then something comes along the way and shakes that stability. What if we are approaching things from a wrong angle? What if we set ourselves for failure when we try fighting it?
Changing perspective regarding this topic might help us get a better understanding. Instead of trying to escape this feeling of uncertainty, what would our life look like if we embraced it? Imagine uncertainty as a person that comes and visits us often. What if instead of avoiding the person, I tried sitting down with them and shared what I felt? What if I tried to accept that things in life are uncertain, that I don’t know when I could lose my job, life and so on? I know it doesn’t sound good or it’s not something you or I might want to hear but this is reality. Nothing is sure or certain. We have a false impression of reality and we feel comfortable with it until something happens and shatters our perception. We take everything for granted.
Uncertainty is part of our growth, part of our process in moving toward a different stage in our lives. That stage might be similar to all the previous ones but never the same because it brings different challenges. The choice is always yours: you either move forward alongside uncertainty or try to avoid it and remain the same. You get different results when you change the way you see, do and perceive things, when you take time to listen to yourself and your own frustrations and uncertainties and face those things by “looking them in the eye”. It might not be pleasant but it is definitely the way in which we move on and shape our own destiny and life path.
Nothing worth having in life comes easy. Absolutely nothing.