the illusion of certainty...................

 

Diving in headfirst to explore the unknown is something humans were created to do and cannot resist.  The unknown is where we feel the most alive.  Although our minds crave certainty, our hearts desire freedom.  We live in an illusion of certainty.  Most of what we have can be lost or taken away at a moment's notice.  We all know the only constant is change, yet we spend most of our energy trying to fight what is natural and inevitable and wonder why we are suffering so much.  It is not change that we should fear but staying the same.

-Joseph Nguyen,  Don't Believe Everything You Think

the quest for certainty............

 

     Professor Philip Tetlock has spent most of his career studying experts, self-proclaimed or otherwise.  A big takeaway from his research is how awful so many experts are at predicting politics and the economy.  Given that track record, will people ever choose to ignore the experts?  "No way," Tetlock once said.  "We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people, who promise to satisfy that need."

     The inability to forecast the past has not impact on our desire to forecast the future.  Certainty is so valuable that we'll never give up the quest for it, and most people couldn't get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

The world has always been uncertain......

 

.............................................but:

Control what you can. Read widely the best literature for wisdom and comfort. Listen to the best music for mood management. Shop locally, enjoy cooking and eat well. Spend time with those who listen, support and create.

And walk daily, the greatest distance you can.

-Nicholas Bate

the pilgrimage...................

 

     These spiritual masters understood that a spirituality that begins in the acceptance that one is not "in control" necessarily involves a flexible attitude, which requires a mistrust of the rigidities of certainty.  If life is "unmanageable"—and, of course, at time it is—there will necessarily be sudden surprises, unexpected twists and turns, unforeseen detours.  In recognizing spirituality's—life's—open-endedness, we learn to be flexible and adaptable, thus protecting ourselves from the tendency to want to fix things "once and for all."  Hold fast to the "now" means "hang on and enjoy the ride," for we never know (and we can't control) where the vicissitudes of the pilgrimage that is spirituality will take us.

     The modern mind—so enthralled by technique, so oriented to efficient production and "bottom-line" results, so obsessed with comfort and predictability—approaches the concept of pilgrimage with wariness and puzzlement.  Why backtrack and sidestep when you can march straight ahead?  The word vicissitudes, with its promise of ups and downs, its suggestion of successes and failures, its reminder that we cannot "march straight ahead," is unsettling and disorienting for those who equate progress with perfection.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

differentiated...............

 

History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness, and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex.  But in a developed and complex civilization individuals are more differentiated and unique than in a primitive society, and many situations contain novel circumstances requiring modifications of instinctive response; custom recedes, reasoning spreads; the results are less predictable.  There is no certainty that the future will repeat the past.  Every year is an adventure.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

Unclenching....................

 

Unclenching into life demands that we relax in the midst of the uncertainty and insecurity, because “in the midst of the uncertainty and insecurity” is where we always are. The reward is the aliveness, agency and sense of purchase on life that comes from no longer pretending otherwise.

-Oliver Burkeman, from here

Embracing uncertainty................

 

The nature of discoveries is that they are unexpected: they may not fit neatly into our existing edifice of knowledge. Although the research may be originally motivated by a perceived gap, the knowledge resulting from the discovery may in fact not complete any part of the wall but instead may lead to the construction of a completely new and unexpected area: we may be forced to build a new wall orthogonal to the first, or even to tear down parts of the existing structure. This is an uncomfortable concept for many of us, who would prefer a tidy and beautiful universe, where a rational process helps us to illuminate the world. And yet, the most interesting unknowns of science are unknown unknowns—gaps that we were not even aware of before chancing upon them.

-Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher.

via the wide wide world of Tim Ferriss

Reading with a dictionary at hand.............

 

     Bear in mind that equivocity is true to being only as one way of attending to and speaking of being.  It is true to being as relative to being and as relative to the other senses of being.  Against ironic postmodern truth-refusal and metamodern oscillations between sincerity and indifference at the expense of truth, Chesterton guides his readers to notice how preconceptions can warp attention and prevent clear perception.  This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his detective fiction, which draws attention to puzzlement and indefiniteness, as well as the unexplained intractabilities of reality.  Fitting the metaxological mode of attention at the heart of Chesterton's journalistic metaphysics, his interest is in restoring the adventurous side of life where the comfort of the overly familiar has caused us to lose our primal astonishment and foundational perplexity.  How can we feel at home if we have lost a sense of wonder?  That would not be home but a prison for the soul.  And how can we truly wonder if we have no place of refuge?  Without a safe haven, wonder turns into terror.

      Chesteronian defamiliarization may be misunderstood as an attempt to restore passivity to the perceiver, given that univocity tends to put people in an active relationship with reality, albeit still unconscious and devoid of reflective reasoning.  This is only part of the truth.  As suggested, Chesterton wants to resist the "worship of law," especially the worship of arbitrary human laws, by restoring difference.  But the deeper aim of this strategy is to restore the possibility of genuine consciousness and real choice; that means recovering participation in reality.

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

Uncertain..........................

 

The night before the D-Day Invasion, Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next.

“To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it?” she said.

-Morgan Housel, from here

peace of mind........................

 

I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of uncertainty about different things.  But I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about.  I don't feel frightened not knowing things.

-Richard Feynman

understanding..............

 

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.  A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.

-Eric Hoffer, True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

the very condition...................

 

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.  Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

-Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics

On uncertainty......................

 

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.

-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

lingered..........................

 

Frost, when especially playful or vulnerable, was liable to conduct himself like an unfinished poem.  He lingered on the strange within the familiar, the penumbra of doubt at the edge of the known.  He let his mind rest in uncertainties such as the space between feeling and impulse, impulse and notice, between motives real and recalled.

-Adam Plunkett, Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry

landmines.......................

 Investing would be a lot easier if there were no uncertainty. If someone could just kindly tell you where all of the landmines are buried ahead of time, you could side them completely and go on with your life.

Life doesn’t work like that, unfortunately. Uncertainty is always at all-time highs because no one knows what’s coming next. The hard part is there is this human need for control in life, even if that control is an illusion.

You have no control over what happens with taxes, trade, tariffs, the Fed, interest rates, economic growth, inflation, earnings or stock market returns. None. So it’s really your reaction to the uncontrollable events that determines your success or failure as an investor.

-Ben Carlson, from here

Certain......................

 

I will never be certain about the future. I’ve read too much about the past to be confident about the future. History is full of unpredictable events so the only thing I am confident about is that the future will be full of them too.

-more certainty here

playthings.....................

When a situation looks grim, but also you're not sure exactly how things stand, you form theories that are attractive not because they are the most plausible, but because they give you something to do, and doing something is the only way not to be crushed by miasmic uncertainty and despair.  Fetching water had given me a purpose.  As so often happens for mortals like us, it turned out to be pointless purpose.  But string enough of these together and you've got yourself a life, of sorts.  We are playthings of the gods, and to provide amusement is not nothing.

-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

lottery winning........................

 

Choose humility and accept the fact the only certainty is uncertainty.

Fortune doesn’t favor the brave. It rewards the realists.

All of us have won the Universe’s equivalent of the Mega-Jackpot Lottery by simply existing.

Don’t squander your good fortune by listening to people spraying a firehose of certitude.

-Tony Isola, from here

faith.................................

 

Faith is not certainty.  It is the courage to live with uncertainty.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

the constitutive uncertainty................

 Fatih is the human response to the phenomenon that defines the human condition: the constitutive uncertainty of our lives as we walk towards the undiscovered country called the future.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning