With few beacons of certainty left, doubt is growing on me
Before the pandemic, my 37-minute commute from Southeast London was a time to prepare for the day ahead. Yet, despite my best attempts to be productive, the mobile signal was dropping constantly throughout my journey. After some googling, I worked out that the problem was a patchy network: as I traveled between stations my phone would send out a signal to the nearest cell tower and happily give me data when it received a response back. But, if there was no response the apps would shut down, resulting in lost email drafts and much frustration.
Even though I rarely commute now (hooray for homeworking), recently I have been getting the same feeling - only the patchy network was now the world around me. Previously reliable institutions were disappearing, much like the missing towers, my phone was pinging without response. Want to catch a train into town? The station is closed due to a strike. Expecting a message from loved ones? Your post is delayed. Need a doctor’s appointment? Please hold the line indefinitely. Even the Queen’s passing – an event seemingly so detached from anyone beyond her immediate family – felt like losing a beacon of certainty that was around for decades.
With that realization I initially found myself overwhelmed with a sense of instability. After all, certainty is foundational for us, humans. From birth, it is the core belief that our caregivers love us unconditionally that allows us to form healthy relationships with others. Later, when making decisions about anything from jobs to life interests we seek to reduce the complexity of choice by sticking to what we have rather than gambling on a bigger prize. So how was I to be if I could no longer rely on what I’d known?
It occurred to me that we tend to think of certainty as necessary to progress and, ultimately, power, and of doubt as “lack of” the same – rather than having value of its own. No wonder certainty is firmly built into the fabric of our society. Rote learning – memorizing and repeating the “right” answers – dominates the education system, with UK’s students learning by heart the third most in OECD. Similarly, there is no room for doubt in campaigning, else it gives naysayers a “weapon” to impede the pace of change.
Yet, what certainty also does is shut down intuition – because approximations and instincts have no obvious place by the side of pure logic. I, too, have become reliant on the false sense of “knowing” stuff to make decisions with facts and data. So, when the comfort of the known vanished and the methods I had were no longer relevant, I discovered that I was not equipped to navigate the uncertain.
With time what first looked like a silent void between me and the rest of the world became a quiet space for reflection and exploration. So now I am building the capability of living with doubt – and growing into it, rather than away from it. Over the next few months, Laura Harrison and I will be sharing stories from others who have similarly embraced doubt to see what we can collectively learn from this new space.
