Grey

Learning to live with uncertainty

I’m getting to know myself. Little by little. And what I am realising, is how much I desire certainty. I want everything in this world to be black and white. I want to know right and wrong so I can do right, be right and never wrong. It would be so much easier. I could learn the correct way to live and maybe, just maybe one day get an A. My therapist pincered out this insight. “You seem very concerned with doing it right”. I just assumed that’s what we were all doing, trying to get better at being human until we cracked the code and reached that ever elusive state of happiness. And now I am waking up to the million and one shades of grey. Nothing is only good or bad. Everything is subjective. It’s all perspective.

This is at the same time, both incredibly frustrating and totally freeing. Life will always be in flux, malleable and unreadable, but also… everything is possible.

An important discovery – which works as an example here – has been that I can feel both happy and sad at the very same time. It used to be that if that familiar, icky, depressive feeling was anywhere nearby, I would declare myself ‘sad’ and write myself off. Life was a done deal of dreary until I felt ecstatic again, enough to blow all the cobwebs away and title myself ‘happy’. The nuns at Plum Village (a Buddhist centre in France) helped me understand that I can feel all types of blue and yet still foster sparks of joy inside that I can nurture and grow within myself over time.

My parents were another black hole of confusion. Were they good people or bad? Did I love them or hate them? I couldn’t decide and would swing violently from one pole to the other, in one moment swearing to cut them from my life. In the next, planning trips away with them to spend quality time with them in the time we have left. Now I realise it’s usually both. Sometimes a little more love, other times a little more loathing. The point is, I don’t have to choose. And neither is wrong. How liberating!

For some of you more emotionally mature readers this might seem like I’m pointing out the obvious. But I never learned this as a child and it wasn’t until recently that I ever heard anyone describe this way of being. Surely I’m not the only one, and if so, where did this attitude come from?

With some (minor) research I discover that this black / white ideology I’m struggling with is an aspect of dualism. Dualism – popularised by René Descartes (1596–1650) – dictates that we live in a world of opposites. Something is either good or bad, right or wrong. Our modern world is built upon this foundation. Religion is made up of saints and sinners. Medicine tells us the body and mind are separate and distinct. Morality teaches us that the world is made up of good people or bad people. Insiders and outsiders. Of course, I’m massively over-simplifying. Or am I? The knowledge that there is another way to view the world is pretty new to me. I’m still in shock.

It makes sense to me that as a culture we would be drawn to dualism. It is easier to understand. In that framework, I can choose a hero and a devil, create a clear narrative for myself and work towards that which I’m told is right. Only, it isn’t. When you get to the middle of your life and the way that you’ve viewed the world so far, the way you’ve lived, climbed and rationalised doesn’t make you happy, you have to make a shift. When you realise it’s all smoke and mirrors and you crave a new way of understanding yourself and everything else.

I still have to remind myself that I’m allowed multiple emotions ever day (hour, minute). With this remembrance, I can soften. It’s ok. There is always something good inside I can focus on, some small glimmer of joy, even if it’s the tiniest chink of light. I can believe something for a time and then open myself up to another possibility. I can be right for Jill and wrong for Jack. I can change my mind. I am a complex organism capable of holding a multitude of contradictions.

This freedom is terrifying and requires me to unlearn a lifetime of restricted thinking. If someone offered me guide to life I’d take it and never look back but I don’t think that’s coming my way. So instead, I’ll learn to spread out into the unknown, relax into ignorance and learn to love the ever evolving, always surprising, delicately shaded world I find myself in.