I crave certainty in an uncertain world

Suffering from anxiety as I do, I often crave certainty. I don’t just crave it, I demand it. I want to feel safe, safe from the terrors of the unknown, for the unknown promises uncertainty, foreboding, darkness and potential misery.

If I am certain, then I am safe. If I am certain, then all will be well.

That is all I ask.

Not everyone is a fan of certainty, the physicist Carlo Rovelli believed that a complete lack of doubt was undesirable, and that certainty about everything had the potential to be damaging. 

Will I only acheive certainty by doing nothing?

But not to the anxious.

“Certainty is the death of wisdom, thought, creativity.”

Shekhar Kapur

Strangely, I have done things in my life that have brought me no certainty - single parenthood and self-employment, instead of the security of Mr Nice, a white picket fence and a secure job.

Perhaps deep down, I want risk and excitement but with the promise of a happy ending.

Sadly it doesn’t work that way.

“There is no certainty, there is only adventure.”

Roberto Assagioli

I want adventure but with a promise of certainty, but adventure cannot bring certainty, only risk.

But what is it David Bowie said in Law, Earthlings on Fire, “I don’t want knowledge, I want certainty.”

Except I would like both.

Perhaps I should follow Bertrand Russell’s advice and study philosophy.

“To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.”

Bertrand Russell

To live without certainty and yet not be paralysed by hesitation.

So it is to finally accept uncertainty in my life and not be crippled by doubt or;

To have certainty in my life, but without the joy of risk and adventure.

It is a difficult choice.

A Monday afternoon's musings on non-specific things while eating a chocolate brownie

After feeling particularly cheesed off, I eventually took off for a walk in the hope that some fresh air and different surroundings might help to shake off my low mood.

My brain feels like it's flatlined, I feel strangely irritated and easily roused into a bad temper. I'm tearful, fed up and I don't think I can simply put that down to Friday's general election results. It's just a temporary, passing mood, one that will go as quickly as it came.

I'm now sitting at a table in Blue Skies, waiting for a large coffee and a gluten free chocolate brownie. I have no particular allergy to gluten, but always err on the side of caution seen as my stomach is so sensitive these days. I have a large cookie in a brown paper bag - a purchase to take me over the £5 limit and avoid the 45p surcharge. 

It's bright and airy in here and the sound of voices, mostly children and young women, serve as a calming influence to my agitated state. They're probably students, out on a break from the drudgery of lectures. When I'm like this, it's good to sit on the sidelines, not quite part of anything and yet strangely still part of the milieu. I'm sat smack bang in the middle of the room, on a four seater rustic wooden table. Some children have come in and sat in front of me with, I'm guessing, their grandmother.

The boy is now swinging on his chair. I can remember doing that at school. We were absolutely forbidden from doing it, but I did it anyway. I think someone must have fallen off the back of a chair once and gone flying. The thing to do was to push your chair back while you were sitting on it, and push it back so you were balanced on the 2 back legs. A precarious balancing act that could end in disaster.

Those long, hot summer days when the future was so far away you could only imagine it into something exaggerated and fantastic, and create possible scenarios that you knew could never really happen.

But there we are...fast forward to today and here we are, musing on the past, the present and everything else in between.

Today has been an escape, a short one which I'm hoping will help to give my brain enough time to recuperate from my irritated mood. A trip out which might inspire me to come up with new ideas or refresh already existing ones. 

We can live in hope.

And anyway, it was an excellent excuse to eat a chocolate brownie.......and a moment like that is never wasted.

I think Winnnie the Pooh makes a valid point when he says that sometimes listening, doing nothing and not bothering can have its own value. And I always agree with whatever Pooh says.