Anxiety and Uncertainty: Loosening the Knot
Learning to accept that there is only so much within our control
Back in January, when the new year felt fresh, a New York Times essay — “How to Thrive in an Uncertain World” — caught my eye.
Immediately a Pema Chodron title I go back to again and again came to mind.
Comfortable with Uncertainty
Nuance is everything. Accepting that there is only so much we can bank on knowing is a given. But thriving in the midst of an uncertain muddle?
“We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe,” Chodron writes. “But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid.”
Read enough of Pema Chodron’s books and you begin to see them as variations on a theme — getting out of our own way in freeing ourselves from patterns that really do not serve us well. Rooted in Buddhist precepts, the wisdom she imparts, sometimes detailed, is peppered with stories. Sometimes she cuts to the chase. The titles of her books speak volumes:
The Places That Scare You
No Time to Lose
Start Where You Are
When Things Fall Apart
Watch her in videos and you feel you’re in the presence of a wise, witty mother/grandmother — a guiding presence rather than a didactic one. I am by no means an adept when it comes to fathoming the depths of Buddhist wisdom. I grasp tidbits, received with all the serendipity of messages in a bottle. For that I’m grateful.
* * *
There are people for whom anxiety and uncertainty do not go hand in hand. I’m not one of them, though I do my best to make friends with my demons or quell them in ways that work for me — meditation and yoga, listening to music, daily walks. A glass of wine with dinner works wonders.
It took years to recognize that I was so often hitting the override button in terms of the places that scare me. The pandemic brought a new level of anxiety that’s only beginning to dissipate despite its lingering collective trauma. MAGA madness won’t let me (us) be. News headlines make me cry or cringe. Personal issues, be they work- or health-related, have me checking my email or doing Google searches much more often than is good for my mental well-being.
Until a better instinct tells me to pause and take a deep breath. Get off the proverbial train. It’s a learned behavior and speaks to why thriving would seem at cross-purposes with the nature of uncertainty. Comfort, like thriving, is certainly a word in many contexts. But the sound of it soothes me.
Letting go of the need to know, or at least get a sense of which way the tide will turn is no easy matter. Do thousands of years of Buddhist wisdom become tangible when an award-winning writer, Maggie Jackson, reports on developments in neuroscience that suggest how accepting uncertainty may be more a blessing than a curse?
Do I really feel any reassurance reading about “The Upside of Anxiety” or “How to Worry More Mindfully?”
Back in 1951, Alan Watts published The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. Years later would come The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle) and The Quantum and the Lotus (Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan). The list of titles offering insights into ways of being in an uncertain world, maybe even getting some tips for changing our mindset, is endless.
We look to the future as (hopefully) better. We set goals. We long for a sense of security (illusive as it is). We crave concrete explanations for what eludes us. The bottom line? It takes work and courage to own up to our patterns, our fears, our anxieties. It would seem so easy — recognizing that the present moment is really all we can live in and seeing change as the only real constant. And yet . . .
***
My husband comes rushing in from his office, agitated. He uses the word flooding. I follow him back to the office and hear the splatter of raindrops where they do not belong. Not quite a flood, but a leaking skylight. He places buckets in strategic spots.
My anxiety meter shoots up. When will the rain stop? I look at my weather app and take some comfort in seeing that it will stop, though not for hours.
Expectation is a bitch, as is my need to know when the rain will stop. We hunger for answers to why things happen out of the blue. My husband is convinced the leak is a casualty of a woodpecker pecking in places it should not be.
We look into crystal balls. We perseverate. We play out scenarios — what if what if what if? — tell ourselves stories that all start in the same place — right here right now — letting our minds meander to no middle or end that can ever be satisfying for the very reason that it’s all speculative.
Every situation is a passing memory (again Pema Chodron).
I’m tired of being so afraid of so much. That’s a good thing — right? But maybe neuroscience, for all its best intentions in helping me understand myself, sometimes misses the point. There’s knowing and there’s Knowing. A step in that direction, for me, is leaning into what Tara Brach calls Radical Acceptance, a way of being with our fears and vulnerabilities instead of pushing them aside.
Enough steps along this road and maybe I’ll even find my way into the heart of Pema Chodron’s latest offering — How We Live Is How We Die — without adding it to my library.
