The Importance of Trusting Uncertainty

You don’t know what you don’t know.
It’s a simple and powerful truth.

What if, when we don’t know there’s “a special knowing” that’s there for us?

Uncertainty is like spring. When a daffodil bulb feels the call of the sun warming the earth, it can’t see the light but it knows it’s there. And through a gesture of faith, it begins its journey to the light.

Everywhere around us there are facts, opinions, data and information telling us what to do, how to be and how to think. In the midst of all this information, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and cut off from something essential, ultimately true and absolutely us.

Everything in your brain is a memorized moment and thousands upon thousands of reference points that the ebb and flow of our life is filtered through. Our brains are full of what was.

There is nothing wrong with this it’s just what brains do.  They are reference machines that help us take our life and filter it through all the cookie cutters we’ve used to navigate the world.

Uncertainty, when we make friends with it, is the leading edge of the life we are. We are driven so to speak to avoid uncertainty. We have been taught to, as quickly as possible, turn uncertainty into what is understood and therefore predictable.

It is an understatement to say that we live in a complex environment. It seems counter-intuitive to use uncertainty and all of its richness as a compass.  How do we know where we’re going if we’re uncertain?

Trusting uncertainty requires us to slow down.
Trusting uncertainty is a lifesaver.
Trusting uncertainty allows soul filled intuition to begin to inform us.

When we use our intuition, we can gain understanding that goes beyond all the memorized bits and pieces. 

The drive to know, to cancel uncertainty can box us in and cancel our sense of creativity and wonder and greater possibility.

Uncertainty gives us a chance to trust what is emerging, like the daffodil reaching for the light.  Life isn’t memorized.  The life we are is always emerging calling our memory patterns and our personalities to let go of all the tiny boxes we want to tie ourselves up in, all the cookie cutters we use to shape ourselves and others into the forms they are supposed to be.

At our roots we are wild and hungry to draw outside the lines. When we’re uncertain we can use it as a reminder to let our wildness teach us how to receive the greater richness of our life if we let go and put down the habits that shrink us into conformity at the loss of the song of our souls.

A Blessing for Times of Uncertainty

We will try to reach in a thousand directions all at once.
We will seek shelter in a storm that we need not hide from.
We will want to run to what once was.
Don’t worry, these are just habits that have been used in the past.

What we are, beloveds, is greater than any habit.

The gift in this uncertainty we are experiencing is the great aliveness we are becoming, breaking free of the false comfort certainty brings.

Let go. Make friends with the grasping.
Do not fight.
Trust the stormy turmoil knowing that what you seek to understand will come to be.

Within us is a clarity of wisdom greater than all the howling inside.

We are alive beyond reason
We are not alive because of what we know.
The rich aliveness that we are is calling to us from the gardens of uncertainty.

The discomfort when we are uncertain comes from reaching backwards in an attempt to try to understand what is new, what is emerging.

Let yourself be pulled forward, eased into what it’s time to know and experience in newness.

Remember you are more new than you are old.