The Dance of Uncertainty

First published on October 12, 2017

I went home this weekend. Not to the new home that my fiance and I have created in London, but an older home. The house I grew up in. And, for the day, an older home. The Yorkshire market town I was born in, where my parents wheeled me around for my first trip outdoors. Where I took my first steps.

This is both a settling and unsettling experience. There is a feel to that valley, where I was born, where the river that I was named after flows, and to the old farm house where I lived for many years. A connection. This is where I came from. It settled me. 

And it unsettled me.

I won't be back there soon. I'm going to the other side of the world. It's an adventure, but I don't feel adventurous. I think of those places, of the visceral feeling they give me. My places. Connections deeply felt, going back decades. As I think of those places, I feel scared. Going to a place where I have no connection, where I don't even know what is legal and what isn't.

And uncertainty is unsettling.

My father shared some wisdom with me this weekend, as he has so many times over the years. This time it was the wisdom of Ken Wilbur. That really life is just a balance between familiarity and novelty, between certain and uncertain, settled and unsettling. 

That is the dance, in each moment.

Too much certainty and we are bored, unchanging, unlearning, ungrowing. We are stagnant. Unfulfilled. Too much uncertainty, and we lose ourselves.

Don't fly too high, Icarus. But don't fly too low, either.

Stretch yourself, but look after yourself.

Change yourself, but remember yourself.

Be yourself, but remember that you can change. You will change. You are changing.

There the dance is.