“The only certainty is that nothing is certain.”
~ Pliny the Elder
Remember when you were little and you had no doubts about the existence of Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy? Remember the crushing sorrow that came with finding out your parents or grandparents drank the milk, nibbled the carrots, and left the quarter under your pillow? (If we want to complain about inflation, let’s start with the Tooth Fairy… there’s some serious price gouging and a definite monopoly occurring.)
We probably all remember at least a twinge of sadness from learning those fantasies weren’t reality. It’s why we try to protect our little ones and attempt to let them stay in that place of magical thinking as long as they can. After all, no one makes it to adulthood still believing in those illusions, right? Maybe we just shift from one fairytale to another, but I know plenty of adults who vehemently believe odd things and no amount of logic will change their minds. Sometimes I am one of those adults.
Maybe Santa and the Easter Bunny go by the wayside with our stuffed animals, but humans seem to cling pretty hard to the dogmas we pick up along the way. Particularly the ones we think we discovered by ourselves, the ones that make us feel like we belong to a special club or tribe, and the ones that coddle us with the belief that we’re right and everyone else is wrong (especially evident in politics, religion, musical genres, and sports teams, to name a few).
As a young adult, I had a good long run of confident certainty about how things were going to go if I dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s according to the instructions. And then life happened, and it did not meet my expectations. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has reached maturity and says everything that happened to them in life happened just the way they expected. Sometimes the world changed around us without our permission, sometimes people disappointed us, and sometimes our expectations were the same kind of magical thinking that had us shoving our baby teeth under our pillows in exchange for money.
I miss those days of being certain about everything, from the best way to raise children for future success to the right direction to hang the toilet paper. I’m still dogmatic about the toilet paper, but that’s one of the few things that hasn’t been turned inside out, upside down, and twisted around a few times like a candy cane. It was comforting to think in terms of certainty and absolutes… until one day it wasn’t.
Living in the uncertain and accepting the unknown is uncomfortable, but it allows space for improvement, room to adapt, and a gentler acceptance of oneself and others that’s sorely lacking in our quest to be “right” about everything. Maybe there’s comfort to be found in the uncertainty, too, but I think getting there is going to take some work.
