An argument to ditch certainty in life
Hello fellow Protagonists,
Adding on from other posts, let's interject with another concept around freedom to add into our collection and continue to build our understanding of what many people believe to be their key core values.
Straight in with the 1-2.
As long as we are striving for certainty (stability as it is more politely put) we decrease or even remove the ability to find freedom.
Many of us may believe the opposite to this, that stability enables freedom. That stability provides the time and availability to express freedom. So let's look into this more deeply.
If anything is 100% certain in life, this also means that the outcome of that situation is inevitable. If something was 100% certain there is nothing you or anybody else could do to change that outcome.
Under these circumstances, how could anything we do be considered free if the outcome was never to change? Isn't this the complete opposite of what we want?
By aiming for complete certainty or stability in life we would be proactively aiming to reduce our ability to change the outcome.
The next big point is in realising that certainty is linked with complete stability, and stability is something that can never be achieved. For something to be purely stable we would need to be in control of all external, as well as internal events. Which is impossible.
So by aiming to make something certain what we are actually doing to ourselves is reducing our freedom, in order to reach a concept that doesn't exist. This is why we can always aim for stability, because it is not achievable and can eternally keep us busy for the rest of our days.
Certainty hunters may also be the same people who preach about creating SMART targets - the A meaning Achievable. There are no SMART targets to be had when looking for certainty; It is just not achievable.
Some may say, well what about goals towards a bit of certainty? I am not sure you can have a "bit" of certainty. Doesn't that defeat the point of the word itself? To me being a "bit" certain is like being a "bit" full, or a "bit" dead. Something is full when you cannot fit any more of whatever inside it, if you can fit more, it is not full.
If we are aiming for certainty, then that must mean we are aiming to be free from uncertainty.
J.Krishnamurti stated that freedom doesn't mean freedom from something, for example from uncertainty. He said that if we aim to be free from something in particular we are creating a reaction where we are linking our sense of freedom to a past event.
If we consider the past to be constructed and based on misinformation from our own ego (we wouldn't be a million miles away if we did), we are bolting our freedom to something that no longer exists. This is why Krishnamurti also believes that a person can never say "I am free" as we would be doing the same thing.
What we can see freedom as instead is as a sense, not something to seek or required to break away from something else.
Freedom when applied as a sense provides opportunity to doubt and question everything in our lives. If we can question things then we can act in the moment to change our way of being.
To be able to act in the moment and change our way of being requires uncertainty.
Uncertainty means the outcome is still up for question and we require this in order to make any change. If something was certain there would simply be no point in doing anything about it.
Questioning and doubting our lives may be uncomfortable but will enable us to identify what it means to live as we want to live. For example, we can start to question our conformity to things.
Conformity is a massive topic and pretty much means anytime we do something due to a belief we hold about ourselves, others and the world. That is for another post but all we need to consider as this point is that conformity breads conflict.
So:
Certainty (stability) and freedom are not friends
We cannot be free from something, freedom is a sense in the moment rather than bolted to the past
Nobody can say they are free, but what we can do is use our sense of freedom to question life and the status quo, which enables us to act in the moment
Uncertainty is not something to run from but to embrace as it is required to make change.
At this moment in time I can only think of one certainty in life and that is "That things to be will be" - Que sera, sera and all that, Doris.
GLHF (Good Luck Have Fun)
Warrick
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