I don’t remember how I ended up on Jocelyn K. Glei’s mailing list but I’ve been getting her emails for years now. I skim a lot of it but last week’s subject line caught my attention: “Uncertainty training.”
Of course, my first thought (“Yes! Tell me what to do to make the uncertainty stop!”) was not exactly the point of the email, but I do think it’s a helpful re-frame regardless:
One metaphor that I’ve been working with lately to cultivate a more friendly attitude toward the current state of chaos and disruption is the idea of “uncertainty training.”
Depending on our level of privilege, each of us have had very different experiences of “uncertainty” in this life so far. But now, given the precarious state of our planet, our climate, and our democracy, we all seem to have been collectively enrolled in a new kind of “uncertainty training.”
… On a walk through the woods the other day, I was interrogating this idea of “uncertainty training” — what does that phrase even mean? And what, exactly, would uncertainty training look like?
I suppose the appeal of the “training” reframe is that it creates the feeling of a useful learning program that you are opting into with some long-term benefit in mind. That it’s not just that everything is falling apart and you’re holding it together as best you can, but that there’s some kind of method to the madness, some greater purpose to everything that’s unfolding.
I think the greater purpose is just learning to be human, or how to enjoy life despite the horrors. As she continues:
Going on my morning walk everyday, making a cup of tea, taking time to breathe and come back into my heart, writing in my journal, talking it out with a friend. Assembling tiny little anchor points minute-by-minute, day-by-day, to keep myself grounded and sane.
And maybe, in the end, that’s all that we are training for. To attune more deeply to the medicines we have to offer each other and ourselves, to the practices that help us stay rooted, to our own capacity to breathe in, to breathe out, and to hold more.