Dealing with Uncertainty

It’s been a few weeks since I last posted, after a 39-week streak of publishing weekly articles. I had set a goal of posting every week for this entire year. Alas, life got in the way, but on the bright side, it allowed me to take a break from the self-imposed pressure that I inadvertently created with this lofty and arbitrary goal. It gave me a chance to step back and reevaluate what really matters. This was quite fitting for this week’s topic, how to deal with uncertainty and the unexpected. In my recent posts, I’ve been discussing insights from my second pass at reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, a book that blew my mind the first time around.

Uncertainty is often the cause of worry. We’re not sure if things are going to work out the way we want them to, and that makes us nervous. We can’t predict the future, or perhaps more accurately, control the future. Quite often, we catastrophize and think about all the things that could go wrong, and then try to methodically put in place measures to ensure that none of them can happen. Or we get anxious and can’t relax, searching desperately for ways to know for sure that we’ll get our desired outcome. But the reality is, life does not work that way, and it never has.

First of all, control is an illusion. Not only is it impossible to control time, but our world is just too complex and unpredictable to be able to manage every variable perfectly. This was one of my biggest takeaways from Four Thousand Weeks. We can keep spinning our wheels and working hard to move things in the direction we want, but it’s never going to be enough. No matter how good your plans are, how much intelligence and skill you possess, or how hard you work, it’s still true. There will always be things that are beyond your control, both things that you might predict as well as some surprises. That sounds kind of depressing!

But consider this: knowing that we can’t possibly be in full control of our time and lives can be liberating. It takes away some of the unreasonable and futile pressure we put on ourselves to try to manipulate circumstances to our will. For me, it helps to look back on key events in my life, and recognize how many of them were unexpected and outside of my control. No amount of preparation or planning could have prevented many of the tough events of the past few years at the local, national, or global levels. Nor could I do anything to avoid or eliminate the discomfort and pain, but both of those lessened over time.

Don’t worry, there’s a positive side to it too! Most, if not all, of the things that I am grateful for and that brought me the greatest joy in my life came not because I willed them to, but by chance. My jobs were not the result of meticulous career planning, yet I have had amazing opportunities to learn, grow, achieve, be inspired by and help a wide variety of people, and travel to places I never imagined I’d go. I met my husband by pure chance when we were living on opposite coasts and I had given up on ever finding another partner after my first marriage ended in a messy divorce. So what evidence is there that we need to tightly orchestrate our lives in order for it to turn out well, or to avoid bad things from happening? We’ve made it this far, haven’t we?

Perhaps this perspective can help during those times when things don’t go quite as you expected or wanted, and the future is unclear. Nothing is broken, or for the tech folks out there: it’s a feature of life, not a bug, aka working as intended. So what can you do if you don't have control over what happens in life? As always, focus on what you do have control over - yourself and what action you choose to take.

It’s okay not to be perfect or always feel like you know what you’re doing. Neither of those are realistic, so just try and do what you can. Take the next necessary step. Don’t worry about figuring it all out up front, because you can’t. And if you have to change your plans unexpectedly, don’t look at it as failure. Maybe you learned that there is something else you need to do first. And don’t forget to look back at what you have been able to get done. I could have very easily felt bad or guilty that I paused my blog short of my one year goal. But I’m pretty damn proud of being consistent with weekly writing for 9 months, even when I was on vacation, had a busy weekend, or hadn’t picked a topic ahead of time. I’ve written about things that matter to me, and while I don’t know yet or may never know the results or impact of my effort, at the very least it serves as a reminder to me of what I’ve learned and who I am.