Borrowed Certainty

The Land of Unknown Steps

If you’re paying attention, you’ll start to see the recurring themes in your life. Not all the time, but when you do, you begin to understand that life is sending you a message. How you interpret that message is an entirely different conversation.

This past week, in conversations with four or five different people, the theme kept circling back to certainty: having a plan versus going with the flow, and essentially owning whatever decisions you make. It wasn’t until a phone call with a friend that I realized they were all pointing at the same thing. And to show you life has a sense of humor: all of these people were having these conversations with someone who has embraced uncertainty. I’ve chosen to stay open to possibility because I learned early that nothing and no one is certain, guaranteed, or promised.

There’s No Blueprint

When I was younger, I remember always being asked, where do you see yourself in ten years? I hated that question. All I could think about were the possibilities, and the choices within those possibilities, each with its own outcome. How is anyone certain of where they’re going when there’s no blueprint for this thing called life? I guess that’s why people keep trying to chart the average of progress by age, by year, by milestone. How can someone create their own reality when we haven’t figured out our purpose yet? Life was presented as a formula we’re supposed to follow, and the formula shifts depending on which boxes were checked when you were born. Any deviation from the original formula changes the boxes created. Each decision we make creates a new formula. One that had yet to be studied before a plan of action could be drawn.

I was certain I was not certain of anything. But over time we learn you can attempt to plan your life, and it still won’t match what life has planned for you. We create our reality with every decision we make whether we are certain or not. It starts with the first step, and then allowing the next step to reveal itself. And it will only reveal itself if you trust that it’s there, whether you see it or not.

When I think about all these people trying to be so certain about everything, I realize it’s based on imagery. They have an image of what they think it’s supposed to look like, because they can’t imagine not knowing ahead of time how it’s going to turn out. They’re looking for a reference point. But life doesn’t work like that. The crux is: no matter what you do, you have to own the decision, regardless of the result. And that’s why people stay stuck trying to maintain an image. Because what does it look like if it doesn’t look like this? And what will people think if they don’t understand?

Funded on an Image

That need to protect an image doesn’t stay personal. It scales up into the organizations and institutions we trust to do good.

I received a phone call that was one of those conversations. My friend asked me a simple question: why do certain organizations keep getting funded when everybody in the community knows there’s no validity to their claims that they’re helping? They asked me because they knew I’ve sat on a few grant review panels. And it’s a fair question, because I’ve watched the due diligence that’s supposed to vet these organizations come down to someone having seen them uplifted on social media, with no real proof of impact behind it.

So the people who actually live in that community end up watching an organization take in resources, build a polished image of doing good, and deliver the bare minimum, and somehow keep the funding coming anyway.

And that’s when it clicked for me. The organization and the funder are caught in the same trap simply because they are human too. When someone finally questions where the money went, the funder has two choices. Push the organization to step up so the funder doesn’t look bad, or admit they made a bad investment. Either way, they’re protecting an image. And either way, the image still cracks, because what they were really protecting was the public’s trust that they’d been certain about the decision all along. But these organizations are made of human beings, with human tendencies, and human beings get it wrong sometimes. Yet, nobody wants to admit that because someone would have to own the decisions. Nobody wants to be known as the one that made the mistake. But, how else do we learn to own the results of the decisions or mistakes we make?

The Illusion of Security

If institutions borrow their certainty from image, individuals borrow theirs from something just as fragile: the paycheck.

There’s this uncanny certainty people carry about making a life for themselves through a job. But this country wasn’t built on the promise of a steady paycheck. It was built on entrepreneurship, on small businesses and barter systems, on people trading skills and goods long before anyone measured security by how many decades you could give a single company. Somewhere along the way, American culture rewrote that story and taught people that working for someone else’s company or organization guarantees some certainty about their income.

They lean on that illusion of job security so heavily that they convince themselves: if they say and do all the right things, they’ll be safe from the uncertainty of when and where their income comes from. Yet employers can end that employment at will, whenever they decide they have a valid reason. I’m sure the hundreds of thousands of Black women pushed out of the workforce in the first months after this current administration got back in office were certain they were secure, too. Because as the saying goes, the only thing we can truly be certain of in life is that it comes to an end.

There are so many people paralyzed by the thought of uncertainty, constantly planning for the what-ifs and maybes, chasing some form of certainty in every corner of life, because they’ve bought into the image they were sold about what life is supposed to look like for the average human being. The over analysis of the should’ve, could’ve and would’ves.

Trust the Engineer

The truth is, life looks a little different for everyone. And it has to, because certainty was never really about knowing the future. It comes from what we believe is our definition of freedom, and freedom is both relative and subjective. So in a world of more than eight billion simultaneous realities, certainty looks different for every single person, no matter which boxes you check or what categories you fit into. The hierarchy those boxes create shapes what you’re certain of, right up until the point you place all your faith in finding your purpose and let that purpose lead you, certain that the next step will appear.

That’s the difference. Those of us who have embraced times of ambiguity have placed our faith in something else: the belief that we’re creating every part of our reality out of passion, intuition, education, lived experience, and discernment. We don’t know what the plane looks like, or what it looks like to other people because we’re building it while we’re flying. We keep going because we know the engine works. Either you trust the pilot and the engineer or you don’t.

So looking at this theme of certainty in recent weeks and how I’ve come to embrace uncertainty through the years, I see it as a matter of faith. I’ve come a long way to find the right path for me. I’m at the point of surrendering to my willingness to wholeheartedly believe that the next steps will be there, because I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing and flexible enough to pivot when the next step dictates it. I have to follow the steps that are appearing on my path as they come. That’s all that I can do. The only thing we can ever really be certain of is that we are creating our own reality and moving towards the next step.

Vee