How do you deal with uncertainty?
I like the mantra “freedom is lack of choice”, while simultaneously craving the freedom to choose. That contradiction probably gets close to how I deal with uncertainty.
There is considerable value in having no choice. The most rigid example I can think of is sitting a written examination. You, a blank sheet of paper and three hours. There is nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Yet even there, choice creeps back in. Which questions do you answer? Which one first? How long do you spend on each? Do you trust what you know, or suddenly decide that the question you avoided in revision is the one you can answer brilliantly? Certainty supplies the structure; uncertainty makes the experience interesting.
The same applies to going on stage to deliver lines, give a speech or perform. You want certainty. You have rehearsed. You know the material. You know where you are supposed to stand and what comes next. But absolute certainty would make the performance lifeless. Something has to remain open: the audience, the timing, the atmosphere, your response to the moment.
Perhaps that is what I need: not certainty or uncertainty, but the right balance between them.
There are circumstances in which I positively want to surrender choice. If I arrive at A&E in the back of an ambulance, I am quite happy to hand myself over to the medical staff. I don’t want a seminar on the competing possibilities. At some point I have to commit to the certainty that these people know what they are doing and that, for the moment, they know better than I do what needs to happen.
I am writing this on a cross-Channel ferry. Again, I have surrendered an enormous number of decisions to other people. Someone else is navigating, monitoring the engines, studying the weather, talking to harbour control and deciding our course. The departure and crossing have been so smooth that I wasn’t even aware we had left port. That is certainty as a service: thousands of judgements being made on my behalf so efficiently that I barely notice them.
And yet I have crossed the Channel many times by yacht, where uncertainty is part of the point. You may know the tides, calculate your course and trust your seamanship, but there are sails to trim, wind strength and direction to judge, other vessels to watch and weather that refuses to follow your plans.
That takes me into the territory of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. I can allow for wind and tide because I know they are there. I can trust my skills against conditions I understand. What I am less prepared for is the emergency call saying that there is a boat in distress in my vicinity and that, as a fellow mariner, I should respond. Suddenly the abstract obligations of seamanship become real. The uncertain thing isn’t merely what the sea will do, but what I will be required to do.
So perhaps I deal with uncertainty by trying to surround it with enough certainty to make it manageable. Knowledge, preparation, experience, routines and competent people all create a framework within which uncertainty can exist without becoming chaos.
After all, what would the ultimate certainty look like? Death, presumably. Or perhaps a monastery, where the hours, rituals, meals and obligations are prescribed. Solitary confinement might offer an even more terrible version: virtually every choice removed.
None of those sounds much like freedom.
So I don’t think I want certainty. I want sufficient certainty to give me confidence, and sufficient uncertainty to leave me alive to possibility. Freedom may sometimes be lack of choice, but too little choice becomes imprisonment. Too much choice, meanwhile, can become paralysis.
Somewhere between the two is the point at which I function best: a course plotted, a destination in mind, and enough wind and tide left to remind me that I am not entirely in control.
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