Picking up the theme from last week, when I was talking about the need for a sense of certainty, I now want to talk about UNCERTAINTY or its sibling VARIETY. This is the second of Anthony Robbins’ six human needs*. It’s possibly self-evident that we need a measure of certainty in our lives, but the opposite is also true. We also need uncertainty. We need variety. We need things not to be entirely predictable.
There has been a lot of theorising in recent times as to whether we are living in an over-stimulated world. Information overload. Emotional assault. All the other implications of our hyper-connected world. There is a contrary argument, however, that despite the quantity of inbound stimuli – email, text, news feeds, demands from friends, family, colleagues, bosses and clients – the nature of it is relatively certain. The algorithms used by the tech companies and the nature of our personal, social and work relationships means that relatively little that comes at us is that surprising. There are occasional curve balls and black swans (to mix my metaphors) but mostly we have a reasonable idea what to expect, and our response to it is also likely to be fairly predictable.
However, if everything in life were certain, predictable, unvarying, it would be dull, stultifying, boring, stagnant. The reason live music and live theatre survive is because there is a certain thrill in being there, in knowing that this one performance is shared but only among these relatively few people and even if it is recorded or filmed, this in-the-room experience cannot be repeated. The reason we love home-cooked food over the heat-up factory product is precisely because the home-cooked version is never exactly the same way twice. Live performance, home-cooking, they are low-level risky, but they are uncertain…and there is something “extra” in that simple fact.
Right now, though, we are living in highly uncertain times. Everything we thought we could rely on has effectively been stripped away. Our lifestyle, our jobs and businesses, our finances. All of the relatively predictable points in our lives, even our tv programmes and magazines, have been flipped from fixed and sure to uncertain and scary. Our anchors are still attached to the ship, but they’re no longer holding steady, they’re weighing free, dragging us where they will…unless we find ways to embrace some of the uncertainty and learn to manage the rest.
In the video that started me pondering these things, Mike Blissett talks about CERTAINTY and UNCERTAINTY being something we need to keep in balance. We tend to equate this expression “in balance” as being “equally weighted”, but as Mike points out it doesn’t mean that at all. It means an equilibrium with a weighting that we are happy with, fluctuating maybe but not by much. As individuals we may be risk averse and want the scales tipped towards certainty or we may be adventurous and happy to have them tipping far more in the other direction. Keeping them ‘in balance’, just means keeping them on an alignment that we’re happy with. I find it more helpful to think about the mix, rather than the balance. Some of us like our food more spicy than others.
Whatever our personal mix, it’s likely that the current circumstances are presenting us with a challenge. Either there is too much scary stuff out there and we don’t know what’s happening, going to happen, how we’re going to be down the line…OR there’s too much sameness about our locked-down life and we’re quietly boring ourselves into submission. At only three weeks in I was surprised to hear how many people were talking of being bored. Quite often these were people who would take a two-week holiday every year to sit on a beach and do nothing. Strange. Slightly sad in my personal view. But nevertheless, a real problem.
It is entirely possible that we’re suffering the apparently absurd situation of having too much uncertainty and not enough variety at the same time. I called VARIETY a sibling of UNCERTAINTY. They are clearly closely related, but they’re not identical twins. I think of Variety as being the quieter younger brother of the wild-child older sister Uncertainty. But that’s just me – come up with your own analogies.
Variety is about difference, unknown outcomes, excitement, a sense of adventure that takes us to the borderlands beyond our comfort zone, to the foothills of fear. We’ll stray over the border but not very far. We’ll bend, maybe occasionally break, the rules but not completely ignore them. We will have the passport and the ticket home.
Real uncertainty drags us way beyond our comfort zone, far out into stretch territory (terror-tory) and doesn’t guarantee us safe passage or a road back. Some of us thrive on that. Some of us do not.
We all need variety. Only some of us need the more extreme uncertainties.
Just as our tasty mix of certainty and uncertainty, control and variety, is very personal so is what we need to do to keep that mix to our taste. I can only speak of my own response.
I am managing the impact on me of the global uncertainty – the whole we don’t know how long it will take, we don’t know what the world will look like afterwards uncertainty – by simply controlling my exposure to it. I am limiting how much news I watch / read, skipping past all the social media posts that are angry or fearful or overplaying the contribution of one group as opposed to another. I am tuning in to the scientists and listening to what they have to say, and to the statisticians who are explaining the limits and vagaries of statistical science. I am remembering one of the many lessons from my Dad: the world is a dangerous place and life is unfair – but you’re going to live your life in this world, so you have to figure it out.
And I love to live in the world. I love to explore places I don’t know. Wander up interesting alleyways, take boat rides, scrounge around street markets, follow peasant paths into the hills, sit in ancient temples, absorb the essence of cultures that I was not born into.
My personal choice for bringing uncertainty into my life is to travel. Obviously not happening. After four or five years off for reasons that regular readers will know, 2020 was supposed to be the year I started travelling again. The planet had other ideas. So instead of dealing with whole new cultures, wide landscapes and all manner of unknowns, I am at home, walking my local patch (and duly grateful to still be allowed to do so), exploring the tiniest details of my garden in its first spring.
Among the UK trips I had planned for this year, once was a weekend travel-writing workshop. In the absence of any better ideas, I decided to run it for myself. I took the weekend and, basically, pretended. I went into my garden. I walked my local walk. And I wrote as if that was the weekend workshop. The piece needs further work, but the exercise was interesting – not least because it meant that I was heading into what could have been a very predictable two days, but by choosing to look at them differently, I introduced an unpredictable slant.
In a similar vein, I have a long-running project, started last summer, which involves a picture a day from the garden, and words inspired by the picture. I don’t live in a hundred acres. I have a suburban bungalow and a garden to match. Add into that: I’m not really a gardener. The foundations of what I have were created for me by contractors last summer, so much more of what I have is Gaia just taking over and doing her thing in spite of me. Some things have died. Some have survived. The most joy is from the ones that have sprung up unexpectedly and taken advantage of what I choose to call benign neglect.
My garden is an uncertain place, because I am choosing to limit the degree to which I seek to control it. And it is a delight. There are birds squabbling over food and nest sites. There are very pretty flowers that are officially weeds (me & the bees don’t care!).
I know that for many, their garden will fall into the category of “something I can control when there is so much that I can’t” and I salute them. Do what you need to do. For me it is into the category of something “I don’t need to control too much, let’s step back a bit and see what happens.” I am intervening – because I know what this plot can do if you let it go for 20 years – that’s a certain outcome I am actively avoiding, but I’m giving it its head in some respects. We’ll grow into each other the garden and me.
I’m staying away from the heart-wrenching and looking for the heart-warming.
I’m being gifted links to and stumbling across live-streaming events. Some are replacements for things I’d be missing (thank you Chris Packham!), some are things I would not necessarily have chosen to engage with (thank you National Theatre, James Corden, the Bristol Old Vic company).
These are things that might change what I do when this is all over. I might be more open-minded. To be fair, given a choice between the local Milton Jones gig that didn’t happen, and the streaming of Jane Eyre that did, I confess that I’d probably have preferred to be in my local theatre…but the point about uncertainty is the finding that out. There’s an old expression of ‘suck it & see’ – we don’t know unless we taste.
I mentioned home-cooking earlier. I am only cooking for me, at least until all of this over, so I get to play. Food shopping has not proved a problem – I have excellent local shops (duly grateful). I am cooking with what I have and what I can obtain and being deliberately less wasteful. Frugality not from absolute necessity but as an encouraged step towards the simpler life I said I want. So while cooking dinner every day is part of my certainty – what I cook and how it turns out is at times in the lap of the kitchen sprites. Not all experiments are successful.
And finally, of course, I have to circle back to the simple act of taking a walk. A walk in the woods, along the river, through the park. If travel is what delivers my adventure then I can choose to have my adventures within a three or four mile radius of my front door. I can walk regular paths as an explorer. I can go out expecting to see, to hear, to follow the route. Or I can go out and take this path or that one on a whim. I can go out to look. Or to listen. I can go out to be mindful or to be mindless (I’m a fan of mindless walks). It has little bearing. A walk is never the same walk twice. Last week I missed a day. That was the day the bluebells shot up and bloomed. I was contemplating their leaf layer on the Thursday, by Saturday the woods were blue-decked.
I think the point I’m coming to is that we can manage our uncertainty to some degree. We can stay away from things that may overwhelm us with it, but to the extent that we need it we can seek it out, we can create it simply by deciding to do things that may not work, that we may not like, or to look in places where we do not know what we’ll find. We can make every day an adventure if we are the adventurous kind.
*Robbins’ six needs were brought to my attention by one of my world’s good guys, @MikeBlissett. Check out his YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaSBaXpJLuU&feature=youtu.be
