Uncertainty

I spent last night tossing and turning because of the current amount of uncertainty and unpredictably in my life. I used to feel like my life was on a track, and I could see exactly where I would be working, living, working out, and who I would be friends with 10, 20, 30 years down the line. An idea of what each summer would be like, an idea of what each winter would be like. It was very reassuring.

Obviously, no one can predict the future. The smallest things can have major impacts on our lives. I hate the cliched “butterfly flapping its wings” metaphor, but I probably wouldn’t even write for this blog if a butterfly ballot in Florida hadn’t placed a man I despised in the White House, as opposed to a man who bores me.

Very few of our lives are in our way predictable. In 1990, my parents never could have imagined living in Utah. In May of 2005, I never dreamed I would spend a year in Florida and become interesting in computer science. If my parents and I hadn’t canceled a vacation at the eleventh hour, I probably never would have even applied to the job.

If it weren’t for two scheduling glitches at my job last year, one in favor, one against, I would have a completely different job right now. If it weren’t for one person I barely knew having a brief change of heart during room draw my sophomore year, I would have left college with a very different group of friends, and I may never have even met Teresa.

Our lives exist in a sea of meaningless noise, attempting to push us in every conceivable direction. Every so often, one of these seemingly meaningless events has a major change in the course of our life. Sometimes we can see it coming, but that is the exception. Even the most tracked people can derail. And even the people who seem to have spent their whole life striving towards one goal, never say the many ways they could get there. When I think of a driven, tracked, goal-oriented person, I think of Hillary Clinton. However, I don’t think she could have realistically believed in 1987, when she was married to an obscure Southern governor who was engaging in multiple risky sexual affairs, that twenty years later she would be the first female President of the United States (probably).

In an increasingly noisy, complex world, however, it is reassuring to have some foreseeable future. This I believe, is the allure of fundamentalism, and helps explains its recent rise. The whole world, even the afterlife, becomes predictable and planned down to the smallest detail. All questions can be answered by one book. I would probably sleep better with that reassurance.

But since that doesn’t really fit me, I occasionally get really stressed out trying to figure out what DOES fit me. Because that is all that we can really do when butterflies flap their wings and change our options from A, B, and C, to X, Y, and Z; know ourselves, and take the options that seem to fit best.