An Honest Uncertainty

Letting go of the urge to be right, and the fear of being wrong.

Photo by Nong on Unsplash

Dear friends-I sincerely thank you for your patience. It has been some time since I’ve written here. I’ve had much transition in my life, namely into a new space in my profession as a spiritual counselor. I now serve in the setting of hospice, making home visits and offering support to people at the end of life. It’s an environment of care that I’ve been interested in for a long time, and I’ve found its early days to already be rich experiences of meaning and wonder.

It’s an incredible thing, to be allowed into someone’s home at the end of their life. There’s a vulnerability and relational power there that is hard to describe. The opportunity to cross a threshold and ask about someone’s life is something that I’ve found incredibly humbling, both as a professional and a person. The question of “Who am I to do this?'“ often comes to mind, but this isn’t a doubt creeping in. It’s an awareness of time and space: someone’s whole life, and my relatively shorter one, crossing years and places and experiences, to now coincide at the very end. What are we to make of that? The answers have been rewarding in their open-ended character. They feel like lamps to follow on the path of life, rather than places to land.

I also have taken time to reflect on my relationship with writing, which has been more complicated than I’ve realized. With that reflection comes a confession: I’m not sure I’ve been fully honest with myself. Writing is something that I’ve been told that I’m good at, but I’ve never quite heard myself in what’s written. I’ve been wondering about why that is, and that wonder has delivered some hard but important truths.

I think I often write in fear of being exclusive. I have wanted my writing to be complete, so as to be accessible to everyone. Sitting at the table, I often think less of who might resonate with my thoughts and more so of who would feel awkward, angry, or bored with what I’m saying. I’ve been highly motivated to appeal to those who have been disenfranchised with what I write about, about wholeness and the human journey and (dare I say it) spirituality. Each sentence has carried an awareness of how that sentence might be criticized. Every idea already contains its own internal scrutiny. Every post has gone to trial with itself. “What would someone who’s suspicious about this topic say?” “What sort of whataboutism would jump in here?” “Am I being accessible enough, or am I leaving something out?” “How might someone find fault in this?”

Coupled with this urge to appeal is the fear of impressing a sense of being right. The truth is, I don’t think I’m necessarily right about anything I’ve written down. To be right isn’t the point, but it is a motivation in the spaces I’m writing in. In a world in which truth becomes increasingly insecure and manipulated, I have a fear of claiming what is true for me. Particularly in the modern spiritual milieu, there are many who claim to be right, to have the closest relationship to truth itself. I’m suspicious of those people and simultaneously worry about becoming associated with that kind of character.

We’re living in a time where everyone wants to be right. About themselves, about the world, about how to live in it. The more correct you seem, to more appealing and interesting you become. Those who appear to have the firmest grip on certainty might confirm something about ourselves, and there’s reassurance in that.

Being right feels like solid ground. When you’re right, you don’t have to do anything else. The job’s done. You can sit there and tell other people what to do, and there aren’t any questions left to ask. Certainty allows us to feel safe, confident, and in control.

Curiously, I have found more confidence and trust in the experience of uncertainty. I think my truth is that the deeper I go into my life, the less sure I become about anything. At one point I believed this was doubt, but now I’m discovering it’s something else entirely.

I’ve realized that I’m not seeking to know, I’m seeking how to walk. I want to learn what it means to be steady in life, to be clear in how I am, to embrace the world as it is. I’m not concerned with being right, I’m concerned about connecting, understanding, belonging. How can I continue to open up? What else is there to discover about my own existence? How does that bring me closer to others? I want to ask better questions, not deliver perfect answers.

I’ve been wrong quite a bit in recent times: not exclusively in terms of doing things incorrectly, but simply by experiencing change. What I thought in the beginning, becomes something else in the end. I started doing things one way, only to realize that it may be better done in another. Our culture often treats that as a personal failure, and I’ve definitely internalized it as such. Somehow, we expect ourselves to do things perfectly the first time, to be flawless before we’ve even begun. I’ve treated my writing in a similar fashion. I’m working to unlearn that, because that approach leaves out important parts of who I am.

Internalizing adjustment as failure and uncertainty as doubt has created an inflexibility in my thinking. I’ve been withholding myself in my writing because I fear giving the impression that I’ve somehow figured things out. I want my words to feel as invitational as they can, and the urge to be spacious has, paradoxically, created a rigid need to be polished and unassailable. Every sentence has to say enough without saying too much. You want to bring people in, but you don’t want to push them away.

What’s most interesting to me is that I approach my work in a completely different way. As a spiritual counselor, I drawn upon an immediacy and honesty that is not only beneficial, but necessary. When people are suffering, or dying, you can’t beat around the bush or find the perfect way to bring them closer to what’s happening. You have to trust who you are, and what speaks through you.

A few weeks ago, I called the daughter of an elderly patient coming onto hospice, dying of metastatic cancer. After I had introduced myself and my role, she launched into a vendetta against her experience of God. Even through the phone, I could physically feel her anger. She blamed God for killing her mom, for the impending separation, for the abandonment that would soon follow. She told me that after her mother died, she would probably never believe in God again.

You can’t prepare for a conversation like that. There’s no such thing as polish. You just have to listen, and be there, and trust the words will follow. That’s exactly what I did, and it led to a powerful conversation with this woman after scheduling a visit in her home. We walked around her housing complex, and she cried, vented, berated. She mourned both the grief of her present and the grief to come. Our conversation had nothing to do with the “right” way through this, or giving advice, or finding some kind of solution. In fact, a solution didn’t even exist at the time. Her mom was dying, she could not accept that, and her experience of God was silent, absent, cruelly unavailable. There was no way around it: that was the path for both of us to walk on.

It was through embracing uncertainty together that allowed us to draw closer to this woman’s life, and what eventually led to her acceptance and quietly renewed curiosity about God once again. Towards the end of our time together, she told me “I can tell you really believe in Him”. This startled me at first-I hadn’t said anything about my own beliefs. I can tell you honestly, I don’t know what I think, as God for me remains an open question, another path to follow for probably a lifetime. I didn’t really know what to say in the moment.

Then I realized: she wasn’t talking about me. She was talking about herself.

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I don’t want to give you the impression that I’ve been intentionally misleading about anything I’ve written about until now. I don’t think I’ve been dishonest-I’ve been chronically hesitant. I haven’t fully said what I’ve wanted to say, because I’ve been afraid to say it completely. I’ve feared the specter of scrutiny, from outside and within myself. It’s been a bit like being afraid of my own shadow.

I think it’s important for me to cross the threshold of writing with the same willingness that I have out in the world. I am able to do this because I’m uncertain: I don’t know what’s going to happen every time I enter someone’s home, but I trust that something can happen that will matter.

I hear myself better in this. In the end, I’ve only wanted to write things that allow people to hear themselves, too. I don’t want to write for appreciation, but for connection. To offer something not as a confirmation of myself, but to open more doors to self-discovery.

As we enter another year, and we reflect on what might change or be made different, may we all encounter things that invite greater honesty and courage into ourselves.