Making Uncertainty Your Friend

by Grant Faulkner

I recently talked with a writer who wanted to make sure not to waste any time taking detours or side trips in his book. He wanted to make sure every word he wrote mattered.

I had to tell him there wasn’t such an approach. Sure, you can write a meticulous outline, a detailed map of your memoir, but even with the most elaborate and methodical plan in hand, I think you still have to get lost in your story to find it. You have to write scenes and maybe even entire story arcs that will have little to do with the final version.

Writing a book of any kind is a fundamentally inefficient process. It’s a process of not knowing, of stumbling in the darkness, of running down a road — just because it’s there, just because you want to keep moving — and then realizing the road is a wrong road, or a road you don’t want to be on.

You’re always living on the edge of mystery, or in the unknown itself, so the process of writing a memoir is a process of reveling in being lost—and then finding your way.

It’s an art, really, the ability to become friends with uncertainty.

You have to develop a strange kinship with the unknown, a trust in being adrift. You place your faith in an unspoken agreement with the gods of Chance, and you then you have to keep believing in Chance even as it whisks you down what seems like a perilous path, testing you, testing you, testing you.

You have to welcome surprise, steeling yourself for the moment surprise might knock you off balance — or steeling yourself for the moment of utter darkness, when it seems as if there’s no path to take.

You become dizzy, moving without a beacon in sight, following the odd scents of intuition. Yet somehow in this peculiar, unbridled state, you become more alert. You’re not passively proceeding, failing to notice things in your rote movement — you’re highly attuned to possibilities. Your senses and your thoughts are enlivened.

Uncertainty as a path of connection

“Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities — for success, for happiness, for really living — are waiting,” said the philosopher Martha Nussbaum.

Opportunities wait because you’re moving in a paradoxical state. You’re searching, tense with focus, nerves tingling with sensitivity, and yet you’re losing your ego, becoming unmoored, becoming part of something else.

That’s because getting lost also involves surrender, and it’s in surrender where we receive things we might not otherwise.

Surrender is too often thought of as a bad thing, as a characteristic of weakness, but it is actually a moment of oneness, of connection, of receiving.

“I think surrender should be an active verb,” said the musician Brian Eno. He says that when you surrender, “you know you’re not in control anymore and that makes you more alert.”

The surfer doesn’t try to control the wave, Eno says, but to balance control with surrender, because it’s only with surrender that the surfer can feel the wave. So surrender isn’t a passive state of being, but a transformation of approach.

What if you think of your memoir like this, as a wave to surf, to surrender to? What if the next time you’re stuck, instead of succumbing to frustration, you see “stuckness” as an opportunity to spend quality time with uncertainty, a time to luxuriate in what I’ll call the spa of lostness and bathe in its unclear waters.

Uncertainty can replenish certainty.

What if we strive to be rich in uncertainty?

Being lost is a state of mind, after all. Instead of panicking or quitting, pause to have a conversation with uncertainty and the possibility it holds. You’re in between things, which is the most fertile of ground. Think about the moments you’ve been lost. I’m sure they held discomfort and anxiety, and perhaps even pain, but did they lead you somewhere? If so, how?

Never to get lost is never to live. Never to get lost is never to find the deeper springs of your story.

What if we strive to be rich in uncertainty? What if we practice leaving the door open for the unknown?

Relish moments of uncertainty as a gift. Taste uncertainty’s potion. Follow it.