Dealing Effectively with Uncertainty

“Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.”

~Arthur Schopenhauer.

Standing at the very cusp of time is a thing we’ve all become masters of. Do we ever really comprehend what that’s about?

Do we ever realise that the instant we don’t keep pace with time is the instant we pass from this life to the next? I’m not sure if any of us can truly get a handle on that reality. It’s an example of the uncertainty we all face—perhaps the most graphic and most significant example.

I’m most sure you’ll relate with this. There are times when life is so good—enjoying a holiday, weekend or some other time-extended freedom—I’d just like to bottle it, staying in that moment... and yet, a weird thing then happens—whenever I “entrap” the moment the bliss ebbs certainly away!

I’ve found all I can do is enjoy the moments like these and know that once they’re gone and the drudgery returns—as it inevitably does, it’ll only be a relatively short time again until the high time of freedom and bliss returns; again, only for a moment.

It is a great blessing to turn-over to the truth that Schopenhauer presents above. Whilst on the surface of it uncertainty seems bewildering, scary and a hellish tease, it actually facilitates momentary thankfulness, for we can only “thank” these ways, in the moment, for the moment.

As mentioned at the top of the article, standing at the cusp of time is an awkward reality. It’s historical, factual, entirely truthful—we’re part of the “living” right now. We’re not these pretend creatures living a dream. We are in what I like to term, ‘live time.’

The greatest truth we can ever get our minds around is this fact: possessions, happiness and uncertainty must merely be accepted for what they are—the former two transitory and the latter a certainty; a condition of life.

When we finally arrange our thinking around the pure facts we can’t change, in a sense accommodating them, we reap an almost magical transformation in our mode of living.

Dealing effectively with uncertainty is simply—at its beginning and foundation—recognition of the blessing it is just to be alive.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.