what if not knowing the path IS the path?

If you think your path is pretty secure and you know what’s coming, then you can stop reading now. This post won’t make any sense to you.

If you’ve got some uncertainty in your life in areas that matter, and/or your experience suggests that life bowls some swinging deliveries pretty regularly (that, by the way, is my attempt to contextualise the American ‘curve ball’) then you’re like me, and there might be something here of value.

So, what if the assumption that wisdom can help me navigate through uncertainty is a faulty one? ‘How to’ help is everywhere. But maybe it’s smoke and mirrors. Maybe my privilege has lied to me about what I am entitled to when it comes to wisdom in uncertain periods of living.

Maria shared a post from Kevin Kaiser that was more than a reminder, it invited me further into the peace of embracing what’s real rather than what I hope for. So this is not my own musing. But what Kevin wrote was profoundly helpful. If I was journalling this I would reproduce his main points and overlay my own reflections, and because this is a publicly appropriate edition of my private journal, it gets a guernsey here. By all means read the post in full, but otherwise here are my ponderings and reproduction of some key points.

• when you deviate onto a road less travelled (in this current season that means thinking radically about money and work and their relationship, tapering consumer habits, getting rid of everything except ‘essential’ items … blah blah blah) you necessarily end up with a load of uncertainty on top of the normal uncertainty of modern life.

• I am not seperate from this uncertain world, I am part of it. My domesticated human life has inculcated me with the false idea that I can control my environment and the circumstances of my life, that I am ‘above’ nature and the natural evolution of circumstances. But I am nature. And nature flows, it doesn’t cling to the now, or anticipate a future, it simply flows organically.

• Kaiser encourages, instead of asking ‘What do I need to do next to get out of this (feeling or situation)?’ ask, ‘Am I willing to be with this right now?’ You’re not solving for anything, you’re relaxing. You’re cooperating with Reality.”

• Kaiser says, ‘Step into the Unknown’. From a completely different context, Adam Kahane, says ‘Experiment your way forward’. I like that way of framing it. It’s not about planning and executing. It is about experimenting, which sometimes feels like groping forward in the darkness.

• Which is a great segue to Kaiser’s next point, which is about not being a seeker as much as an explorer. Seeking assumes there is something to be found, a path that is the ‘right’ path for me. Exploring presupposes that the domain is unknown, and asks of me a different mindset that is alert, observant, curious and cautious. a mindset that respects the terrain and that moves slowly. Today I was on a little bushwalk. I found myself looking sideways into the tangle of trees, scrub and undergrowth. exploring and navigating a path through that, when there is no track, would require a very different set of mental and physical mindsets and competencies. And so I go full circle back to the first point … ‘if you deviate from the established track, there is no path to find.

• Then (in Kaiser’s post) there is some stuff about trusting myself and my intuition. I think I do ok at this, but probably need to learn more.

As we walked the dog this afternoon, Maria commented that these thoughts help us realise that this is not a stage to ‘endure’ or to get through. This is reality for us.

We are waiting for our house to sell which will trigger a bunch of other things. And it can feel like we are just waiting for that to happen, as if we’re kind of in limbo. But there will always be something going on that means the future is uncertain. So instead of seeking the path out of uncertainty, instead of trying to figure out the best decision-making approaches, the invitation is to ‘rest’. To be. To befriend uncertainty.

The alternative is to live in denial. I’ve been good at that. And oblivious or at least naive. I’ve thought that a secure and predictable life was the preferred outcome and so whenever that was threatened, I doubled down on banishing the vulnerability, the uncertainty, the chaos. I mostly succeeded. But it’s been a blinkered view and one that denies the nature of reality.

My vulnerability is not the pathology to be ‘fixed’. My vulnerability to be part of the flow of reality is true. I need to learn how to wrap my emotional, mental and spiritual arms around unfavourable stuff, around pain, around inconvenience, around insecurity. So much to learn, but once I’ve ‘seen’ that denial (of uncertainty) is more pathological than the illusion of predictable security and safety, I can’t unsee it.

I need to be re-wilded. My domestification has made me lesser than I can be. I think.