This article originally started out as an article on the illness my dad had last 2016. Then I put it on the back burner for so long, that I forgot it existed. Today, both my parents have passed away, and I can no longer write an article about how it is to recover, as a family, from the ordeals dad went through without looking at it through the lens of more recent events, which I believe is unfair to it because those were a completely different set of emotions and circumstances that are sure to be overshadowed by their passing within the past two years.
So, I decided to try writing about fatalism instead, or the “it is what it is” attitude. But I then realized that I actually didn’t know much about fatalism. I started researching about it, and I started reading an interesting article about Aristotelean fatalism; unfortunately, for the purposes of this post, that article was an encyclopedia entry from Stanford University’s course on Plato the philosopher, and while I have no doubt readers of this corner of the web would understand that I didn’t have the time to read through it at the moment.
This brings us to uncertainty. At the moment, I am – or was – uncertain about what I was going to write about. I didn’t know enough about fatalism to connect it with “it is what it is”, which stopped me from moving forward with that attempt. I was unsure whether I was ready to write about dad, mom, and everything that happened in the past six years, because I am sure that I dealt with these things better in private, so I nixed that. And up until a moment ago, I was uncertain about what I was going to write about.
It's a bit difficult to find a metaphor for uncertainty. Medieval writers may have compared it to mystical creatures that prevented the kingdom from prospering, like a dragon or a griffin or some other such being. And I started out trying to compare it with being in a car crash. But it doesn’t quite work, because when you’re in a car crash, you’re living at the moment. You’re trying your very best to hang on and not die. With uncertainty, you don’t have that luxury. You’re trapped trying to look for the next step you need to take, but due to one thing or another, you can’t seem to find that next big step.
A lot of people will teach you to dissect the situation into manageable chunks, and that is arguably the best way to overcome this beast. By dissecting your situation, you are able – ideally – to look objectively at various aspects of your uncertainty. What is the cause of your situation, for example? Are you paralyzed by the multitude of choices available to you? Or are you genuinely caught between two very difficult choices that both have their own negative repercussions, leading to a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation? This will then lead to a meditation on your options and an analysis of the pros and cons of each option. Of course, by this point, your natural preference would have already reared its ugly head and you would already have made your own choice…but that just doesn’t quite help you get over the panic, does it?
Another way to get past uncertainty, and my personal favorite, is to stop thinking about it and just do things on autopilot. See, I often get paralyzed by choices, which leads to hours being lost whenever I get faced with a choice. For individuals like myself, skipping the mental exercise altogether and going with the flow, so to speak, is an excellent way of addressing this issue both directly and indirectly. Directly because your action has led you to make a choice, so to speak; and indirectly because you didn’t really make a choice so much as choose the path of least resistance. You’ve made your choice, your bed is made, and it is what it is.
I wanted to write that sometimes though, the third path – inaction, and to just live with uncertainty – was a viable option once in a while, but I have learned the hard way that when I struggle with writing something, I don’t quite believe in what I’m writing, and just starting down that thought, my mind wandered so far away from this article that I realized that I actually didn’t think of it as a valid course of action. Because honestly, who wants to be stuck in a cycle of uncertainty? Who wants to have that difficult choice looming at the back of their mind for days on end, casting a shadow over every choice they make? Some people bizarrely live their lives this way, and while I struggle very hard to understand why and how they choose to live this way, I just can’t.
And yet sometimes these impossible choices do exist. Sometimes the choice of whether to pull the plug from a loved one’s life support system in order to lessen their pain screams against every fiber of your being because easing their pain means adding to yours. Sometimes choosing to spend Christmas in a hospital ICU to look after patients is a lonely life to lead, regardless of how noble the act may be. There will always be choices in life that will lead to the kind of uncertainty that you just can’t escape from, no matter what you do.
But maybe that’s okay. Despite the nature of uncertainty, we probably don’t always have to make a choice right away. This may seem like a terrifying concept for control freaks such as myself, but sit down and have a cup of coffee. Life and death decisions don’t happen every day, and more often than not, you have time to sit back and think about your decision before having to actually make that said decision. There may be repercussions for taking time to act, for sure, but if you’re uncertain about something that could fundamentally alter the state of your life, then that says more about your personality than it does about your ability to make a decision.
My father once told me that Napoleon would tell his aides or his wife to “dress me slowly, I’m in a hurry.” I’ve come to take that anecdote to mean that quick decisions can lead to subpar results. Now, personally, I’m okay with that. It’s better to get that decision over with than to have it looming; I could never get work done otherwise. But some people, maybe they need the time to stew on that decision. And you know what? That’s okay, too. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It is what it is.
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