Getting Discomfortable with Uncertainty

Uncertainty In these uncertain times, I find myself going back to a micro-ideology I came up with a few years ago, basically reminding myself, “Everything works out in the end, even when it doesn’t!” This little bit of self-advice came about when I realized that I was walking around with a chronic sense of worry that if I wasn’t always careful, everything would go horribly wrong and I would experience some kind of calamity from which my life would never recover. This in spite of the fact that over close to 4 decades of living, none of the traumas, mistakes, disasters, tragedies, failures, deaths, or heartbreaks I had experienced had ever managed to ruin my life completely. In fact, all of those events taught me valuable lessons and some of them ultimately proved to be the best thing that could have happened to me! So I realized that it always worked out in the end, even when it didn’t. Which is to say, despite some hardships that seemed insurmountable at the time, I’m still alive, I’m carrying on and I’m relatively happy and comfortable. Naturally, this micro-ideology has been arising for me in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis about which I feel no certainty things will “work out”. Reminding myself that everything works out in the end, even when it doesn’t, helps me relax into a kind of existential acceptance. That it will all be “okay”, as long as I can continue to find meaning or lessons from whatever occurs. Or that someone or something will still be around to do that. This little saying reminds me that anything can happen, and nothing was promised to me in life, including life itself. It forces me to look at our uncertain reality without all of my expectations about what my life “should” be, and instead say, take it or leave it? And I take it.