I. Pagliacci
In the movie Watchmen, the character Rorschach tells the following story:
Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears. Says, “But doctor…I am Pagliacci.”
The uncertainty the poor clown feels closing in around himself is a major theme of the movie — an exploration of existential dread and how to live with it. Ozymandias, the main antagonist and smartest man on earth, banks on the world seeking the doctor’s prescribed treatment for his plan to succeed:
“In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.”
Ozymandias uses and reinforces people’s desire to escape by selling them a vast array of consumer products, for example a perfume called Nostalgia, which in turn fund his master plan — and boy, would Ozymandias have loved coronavirus. He’d have thought it to be ripe with opportunity.
What did you do when the crisis first hit? How did you react? Regardless if you buried yourself in work, parenting, hobbies, or distractions, chances are, you buried yourself in something, and thus, your head ended up in the sand. Depending on the crisis, this may — surprisingly — be a healthy thing to do. Six months into the pandemic, however, Tara Haelle explained why you might have suddenly felt tired — your “surge capacity” was depleted:
Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.
“How do you adjust to an ever-changing situation where the “new normal” is indefinite uncertainty?” Haelle asks. The answer is you don’t, at least not just once, and so irrespective of whether you initially rallied around safety measures, home workouts, getting a promotion, assembling IKEA furniture, or watching movies like Watchmen, your rallying never could have lasted.
A response meant for catastrophe won’t do for a new status quo, and so no matter how deep we may bury its tip beneath the surface, that massive iceberg of uncertainty is still there, still hiding underneath, and when it comes out — and it will — it might crush us like an elephant stepping on an ant.
Tell me you haven’t asked yourself any of the following: Will we get a third wave? A fourth one? What about oxygen? What about shortages? When will I get my vaccine? How much protection will it give me? How long will it last? Will it be required? Directly? Indirectly? What will I be able to do with it? How will “doing stuff” work? When will it reopen? The cinema? The swimming pool? The museum? The office? And what will it be like? This, my friend, is the tip of that iceberg, so if you’re anything like me, PCSD — post-corona stress syndrome — has already crept in. The elephant has long been in the room.
Questions, questions, questions without end. Where those about the virus stop, the existential ones merely begin. We are uncertain about our health, uncertain about our jobs, uncertain about our retirement. We have doubts about the school system, the financial system, definitely the political system, and, really, any system of any kind. We no longer trust in people, for those could be infectious. We never fully trusted the machines, for those are prone to our own errors. And do we trust ourselves? However much you used to, don’t tell me there’s not a crack in that armor.
All in all, that’s a lot to process, and you know what? It’s okay to be scared. I know I am. I’m crapping my pants over here. Not literally, but, metaphorically, on some days, I’m all poop emojis. And not the smiling kind.
Of course, what we should have done over the past year is learn to accept uncertainty. It really would have been a good time. To “live in the question,” as poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said, and “have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.” Instead, most of us have become paranoid, seeking reassurance at every turn. We double-stitch every scratch when a band-aid would do, and then we still go up in anger when the backup of our backup plan fails — and, like in Ozymandias’ great master plan, that’s exactly what uncertainty wants to achieve.
Uncertainty wants to make you tired before you’ve even begun. Its goal is to keep you in place, and, for the past year, uncertainty has had a field day with you. Stay! Good dog. Don’t move a muscle! Breathe shallowly, and wait. Wait for what, however? Until you die? Listening to uncertainty is a fool’s errand. If you don’t move, nothing will happen. Without action, no real errands will get done. And yet, that iceberg looms ever larger, its shadow becoming more paralyzing with every sunset.
There’s another character in the Watchmen movie. His name is Dr. Manhattan. Think Silver Surfer meets Superman, a sorta-naked, blue demigod who can teleport, read minds, see his own past and future, travel between dimensions, disintegrate people on thought, and lots of other fun stuff. Dr. Manhattan tells Ozymandias: “The world’s smartest man poses no more threat to me than does its smartest termite.” The great irony is that, at that point in the movie, Ozymandias’ threat has long been fulfilled — and he tricked everyone, including Dr. Manhattan, into helping him accomplish his quest: sacrificing millions of lives in the hopes of preserving billions more.
In what can’t be a coincidence, Ozymandias calls his plan “the greatest practical joke in human history,” and the message it sends is clear: Even the best of the best can’t fully escape uncertainty. We’re all Pagliacci, and so from time to time, inevitably, we’ll all burst into tears.
II. The Unsui Person
70 years ago, writer Alan Watts, who brought Eastern philosophy to a Western audience, published a book called The Wisdom of Insecurity. Its subtitle? A Message for an Age of Anxiety. Now if that doesn’t scream coronavirus…
In the preface, Watts said about the book:
It is written in the conviction that no theme could be more appropriate in a time when human life seems to be so peculiarly insecure and uncertain. It maintains that this insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.
This “radical recognition,” his central thesis of the book, Watts simply described as “the backwards law:”
I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it the ‘backwards law.’ When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it — which immediately calls to mind an ancient and much neglected saying, ‘Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it.’
I don’t know whether Watts had some crystal ball that predicted every major crisis of the last half-century, but if he thought 1951 was a time when life was “peculiarly insecure and uncertain,” I know exactly which of his 25 books he’d pull off his shelf to hand you today — because isn’t that what we’ve been doing for the last year and a half? Trying to stay afloat? Just getting by, somehow, anyhow, for however long it takes? And how’s that been going? Unlike Watts’ book, I doubt we’d get a five-star rating.
While the world repainted itself in mask and wipe, we were stuck inside. So far, we’ve had almost zero chance to properly adjust to the dramatic — and traumatic — shifts in our society, economy, culture, and environment. Stay home, save lives. But it also meant staying apart, staying put, putting our heads down and letting our brains eat themselves alive.
With the exception of family, maybe a few close-knit friends, our social lives were slashed by Jack from The Shining’s axe, and like in that movie, there was no escape. From work. From monotony. But mostly from ourselves. Were you Tom Hanks in Terminal or Cast Away? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. Whether he pushed around luggage carts or talked to a volleyball, the isolation drove him nuts in both of those — and nuts we went too.
Between safety concerns, financial woes, and psychological drudgery, the one thing we’ve had time for is to watch the news and worry; to play out all kinds of worst-case scenarios in our heads. How can I secure my job? How can I hedge against inflation? How can I protect myself and those I love from infection? The answer is you can’t, at least not alone and definitely not 100%. There’s only so much you can do, only so hard you can paddle, and in times like these, maybe, you’d best let yourself be carried. Flow in the river of time, instead of swimming against its current.
What do you see outside your window? I see movement. Action. Uncertainty. Will the green car bump into the red one? Will the tree lose a branch overnight? Is that guy’s dog about to poop on the sidewalk? Uncertainty is omnipresent. It’s the currency of life, and, like any coin, each uncertain event has two sides. That’s the bright edge of ambivalence, the “Wisdom of Insecurity:” Potential.
Only when you relinquish your anxiety do you get to say: If anything could happen, it might as well be something good. “Trust the wait. Embrace the uncertainty. Enjoy the beauty of becoming. When nothing is certain, anything is possible,” Mandy Hale once wrote. When your Starbucks reopens, will you step into it with confidence? When your job no longer makes you happy, will you dare call it quits? When your bank balance is dwindling, will you trust in your skills? These are questions of attitude more so than of environment.
Alan Watts died in 1973. That hasn’t stopped him from being more popular than ever. On Youtube, you’ll find thousands of videos remixing his speeches, interviews, and ideas, many with millions of views. Like Ozymandias, Watts too had an idea of “the greatest joke of all.” To him, it was the human ego.
In one video, Watts describes “the unsui person.” Unsui is a zen concept. The Chinese word means both “cloud” and “water,” and its original source, an ancient poem, reads: “To drift like clouds and flow like water.” In Watts interpretation, unsui is the opposite of anxious:
“Nothing is more terrifying than the state of chronic anxiety which one has if you are subject to the illusion that something or other in life could be held on to and safeguarded. And nothing can. So the acceptance of everything flowing away is absolutely basic to freedom.”
What Watts says here is that getting rid of our anxiety simply means letting go of the idea that life is something we control. Not in a complete, carelessly-crossing-the-street kind of way, but in an accepting, I-am-small-and-that’s-okay kind of way. That’s what it is to practice the backwards law. To float instead of paddle. And only when you do that can you see life for what it offers, rather than for what it might take away.
III. The Thief and the Moon
In a little hut at the foot of a mountain, a zen master lived the simplest kind of life. One evening while he was away, a thief snuck into his hut only to find there was nothing to steal. When the master returned and found him, he said: “You have come a long way to visit me. You should not go empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.” The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and slunk away. The master sat naked, watching the night sky. “Poor fellow,” he mused. “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”
I’ve always admired the master in this little story called “The Thief and the Moon.” Don’t you? For some reason, he seems to be the clear winner of this encounter, even though he just took a big L. I mean, he had nothing to begin with, and now he’s naked! Meanwhile, the thief is flaunting a new pair of jeans. How is that a win? And why am I jealous of the one who has the least in this scenario?
I’m jealous because the master was willing to trust. Not gullible. Prepared. Prepared to fight back? Maybe. But, more importantly, prepared to turn the other cheek if it was the right thing to do. And it was the right thing to do. After all, he still had the moon in all its glory. That, no thief could have taken.
The thief, on the other hand, will gain nothing from his loot. His mind is riddled with scarcity. He has massive trust issues, and now, they’ve only grown larger. Just like ours. We sit in fortresses protected by security cameras and walls of concrete, yet despite our wealth of treasures we can’t sleep. Our demon is the very king of our castle, and there’s no escape when you share one body with the beast.
Let me guess: For the last year or so, you’ve lived your life in, with, and almost exclusively through a screen. Ah, our pocket-sized window to the world. But if we don’t step outside, don’t step through it from time to time, there’s no action. No real-world connection. Nothing to refute the judgments and opinions, the diamond-hard thoughts we form as we silently observe the scene. They say echo chambers are dangerous, but when it’s just you bouncing your own ideas off the walls, it can start looking like a flubber-laden funhouse. But what happens when you try to leave?
Well, the first thing you’ll notice is you can’t notice as much, because the streets are gloomy-empty, and people’s faces aren’t faces as such. They’re covered in masks, and so your mime-reading abilities are very much messed up. You say “stay safe” at every meeting, it’s every email’s new greeting, and, soon, you swerve on the sidewalk without needing — but the habit still gets welded onto your brain.
When you return to your cave, you cave and check the news, and, oh joy, they’re rich with new, preconceived opinions for you to choose. The media has been in outrage mode for 20 years, and the most divisive election in five decades surely did little to reduce the noise upon your ears. None of these are your fault, but they’re all forces at play, and if you don’t stop juggling rubber balls, you can’t see they’re made of glass — and it’s okay for them to break.
I flinch too when a stranger asks me for directions, but that doesn’t mean flinching is the right thing to do. Despite what some guy tweets about alpha-male competition, humans are built for cooperation. If you live where tomorrow is guaranteed, a stranger is more likely to be a new friend than a thief. In a world where more people die from eating too much than too little, more from self-harm than from violence, and more from old age than infections, that’s…still not everywhere, but a large — and growing — number of places. Hence, it’s important to trust. To be curious. To, when the masks come off, interpret human faces.
What needs to bounce back from this pandemic is you, not your opinions. You’ll need help, but what others will do for you depends on what you do for others — and that requires courage more so than caution. Take risks! Maybe not yet with, but on people for sure. Like a good deed paid forward, trust advances multiply. You break down one wall, and five new people show up with hammers. “A question opens the mind. A statement closes it,” Robert Kiyosaki once said. Instead of doubling down on your assumptions, turn your judgments into questions. “That guy looks dangerous?” “Our boss has it in for us?” “This source can’t be credulous?” Bet on good. Bet on optimism. Bet on people. “Relationships are mysterious,” Christopher Pike wrote:
We doubt the positive qualities in others, seldom the negative. You will say to your partner: Do you really love me? Are you sure you love me? You will ask this a dozen times and drive the person nuts. But you never ask: Are you really mad at me? Are you sure you’re angry? When someone is angry, you don’t doubt it for a moment. Yet the reverse should be true. We should doubt the negative in life, and have faith in the positive.
Trust won’t always work, but it’s almost always the right thing to do. And if it fails? What if someone nicks your wallet? Well, even then you can still sit naked — and watch the beautiful moon.
IV. Prison
In the graphic novel V for Vendetta, mysterious, masked superhero V saves a woman named Evey from two crooks in a dark London alley. Unfortunately, she gets entangled in his plot — the gunpowder plot from 400 years ago — a crusade against a corrupt government in a dystopian world.
To ensure her safety, V takes Evey to his hideout — and tells her she must remain there for a year. Unhappy at the prospect of quarantine, Evey escapes but is captured by the state. Evey lands in a cell. Her head is shaven. She hungers. She is tortured. For weeks on end, her perpetrators ask her for information about V, but she keeps refusing. Just as she is about to give in, letters from one cell over arrive. Evey’s unlikely friend — Valerie — is dying in prison for being homosexual. When the time comes for Evey to decide if she wants to cooperate or die, her rage against the government is so strong, she chooses death…to which her interrogator says: “Then you have no fear anymore. You are free.”
As Evey slowly, dazedly walks past open doors and puppet guards, she ends up right back in V’s lair. Her imprisonment was a ruse. A play put on by her protector. Naturally, Evey explodes, but eventually, V can convince her that who she became in the cell — her strength, resolve, and fearlessness — was still real. The metaphorical prison she’d been in before had been much worse:
You were already in a prison. You’ve been in a prison all your life. You were born in a prison. You’ve been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there’s a world outside. That’s because you’re afraid, Evey. You’re afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You’re afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don’t back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you’d rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside.
For the last 18 months, we too have been in prison. A prison of stagnation, preservation, filled with the fear of loss and reluctance to change. Screen, eat, sleep, repeat. Screen, eat, sleep, repeat. It’s like corona put us in a binder and stored us away. Wooden chess pieces, and rigid inside the box we remained.
In reality, the following happened: The world changed. You changed. The people you know changed. They too had to adjust to working from home, to cut back on hobbies and events, and to deal with a friend of a friend of a friend — or maybe even a close family member — dying from the disease. But you didn’t want any of this change. You never asked for it. You still want to “go back to normal,” and you still didn’t have to deal with most of these new developments in full-on real life. That’s why hope remains — and so does the danger of staying in your prison, where you observe all of this from your screen. Screen, eat, sleep, repeat. Screen, eat, sleep, repeat.
There’s tremendous uncertainty in embracing “the new normal,” so much so in fact that “let’s not do it” becomes an appealing proposition. How are we supposed to go back out into the world and remember not just how we used to do things but also master an entirely new way of doing them on the fly? While everything kept changing, our daily routines have been stiff and monotonous. Our brains are stuck in new, albeit much narrower ways. You’re not who you were last year, but since you couldn’t really see those you care about evolving, you’ll struggle to accept they aren’t either — all while trying to figure out how going to the cinema works now because hey, that too isn’t the same!
What if I put my foot in my mouth in every group conversation? What if I can no longer do small talk at Starbucks? What if I don’t understand the rules or break them by accident? Most of all, what if I no longer like some people I used to love? Is that my fault or theirs? Or the pandemics? And will any of it make a difference? These are valid but unhelpful questions — because reality is all we have, and stagnation is out of the question.
When Ozymandias asks Dr. Manhattan if, in hindsight, he sees the point of his plan, he says: “Without condoning or condemning…I understand.” That’s flexibility, and, as Zat Rana remarks, in a world as chaotic as ours, it’s the only thing that works:
If the world is constantly changing, we have to change with it. Uncertainty, chaos, and complexity are always best dealt with in the moment because you can’t predict where they will lead before you’re near them.
Right now, the wind of change blows so swiftly, you may be afraid it’ll carry you away. At times, it’ll block your vision and make it hard to breathe. But the most dangerous thing is to stay inside a prison of your own making. To choose stability instead of spreading your wings. In the movie The Shawshank Redemption, one prisoner is released after 50 years. Eventually, not knowing what to do with his freedom, he hangs himself. That’s a tragedy. Much worse than embarrassing yourself while learning the rules of a new game.
You can do it. You can change. No matter how long you’ve been isolated, the world outside still exists. What’s more, you can reinvent yourself in a 100 square foot box. Like Evey. Like some of the other Shawshank prisoners. Like some of us, still stuck in quarantine.
When you go to a bar again, will you order a drink you’ve never had before? When you go to the office, will you treat people differently? Will you quit your job or quit jobs altogether? Will you have more ice cream, be a more present parent, or stop following the rules to the letter?
Yes, the world is always changing, and we’ll never quite know how. But make no mistake: The door of your cage is wide open. What you feel is only the wind from outside.
V. Empty Your Cup
Bruce Lee was a hustler, fighter, and a Hollywood superstar. In a life spanning just 32 years, he became a world-class athlete, inventor of a new school of martial arts, world-famous actor, cultural icon, and multi-millionaire. But, and this is way more important, Bruce Lee was also a zen master. A philosopher and perpetual learner. He thought deeply — and originally — about what it means to be alive. In Striking Thoughts, a posthumously published collection of over 800 of his aphorisms, distilled from thousands of pages of personal notes, you’ll find one of his favorite stories:
A learned man once went to visit a zen teacher to inquire about zen. As the zen teacher talked, the learned man frequently interrupted to express his own opinion about this or that. Finally, the zen teacher stopped talking and began to serve tea to the learned man. He poured the cup full, then kept pouring until the cup overflowed. “Stop,” said the learned man. “The cup is full, no more can be poured in.” “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions,” replied the zen teacher. “If you do not first empty your cup, how can you taste my cup of tea?”
It’s true. Life is more uncertain than it ever has been. No one knows what’ll happen tomorrow. No one controls the millions of variables and actors interacting with each other. Not the government. Not the rich people. Not corporations. Not religious organizations. No one. Especially not you, the individual. And yet, we must all live with this uncertainty. We must all move forward.
When we let it run amok, uncertainty does three things:
- It fills us with paralyzing anxiety. We drive ourselves crazy with imagined fear and needless worry, and then we kick ourselves even further into insanity for being so fearful and worried. But the truth is uncertainty holds only as much potential for disaster as it holds for good. We must learn to surf in it. Glide on it. Become the unsui person, and then focus not on what might happen if we fall, but what could happen if we fly.
- It rips out our ability to trust other people. We secretly judge everything, never question our opinions, become paranoid and suspect a thief behind each corner. The truth is most risks we take are risks of rejection, risks associated with social cooperation — and those aren’t dangerous. When they work together, humans win. But in order to do that, every single one of us must take the first step many times in their life.
- It impedes our ability to change. We become stiff, rigid, inflexible. Only concerned with not losing what we have, instead of what other beautiful experiences we might attain. In reality, change is happening whether we want it or not. Turning a blind eye won’t work. As soon as we open up to what’s possible, however, we can dance with life’s dynamism, and we can do that no matter how small our current circle of control might seem.
Uncertainty is not a problem. It is an issue of perception. When your perspective is distorted, uncertainty offers nothing but pain. When you see it clearly, it is just one of many facets of life.
If you feel anxiety, trust issues, and reluctance to change have affected you in the past year, I’m sorry for your suffering. I understand it. I’ve felt it. And I’m aware these issues won’t just go away. When you form new habits of thought over the course of many months, they take time to unscrew. You can’t dissolve them like aspirin in water and cure yourself with a single sip.
What you can do, however, is work on your perception. Consider, if only for a moment, the opportunity in this. The great reset. A chance to start over. And then, chip away at it day by day. The best way to do this, I think, to learn to accept, live with, and thrive amidst uncertainty, is to cultivate a single, small, simple yet all-important habit: Every day, you must empty your cup.
You must challenge your preconceived notions. You must engage with new ideas. You must keep an open mind. No one can do this for you, and it’s not something you can do just once. It’s a philosophy. A principle. A way of life that must be lived in lifelong practice. Bruce Lee knew this. He did this. Lived it. And to remind himself, he used the “empty your cup” phrase a lot. It shows up in his book many times in several variations.
You can never step in the same water twice, my friend. Like flowing water, life is perpetual movement. There is nothing fixed. Whatever your problems happen to be in the future, remember well that they cannot remain stationary but must move together with your living spirit. Otherwise, you will drift into artificiality or attempt to solidify the ever-flowing. To avoid that, you must change and be flexible. Remember, the usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.
So how do you do it? How do you empty your cup? The best I can do to sum up Bruce’s philosophy in two words is this: Keep learning. Every day, present your mind with new ideas. Step on an unknown path, and then linger at the lookout of a newly climbed perspective. Consider a bold opinion. Find a really old quote. Read a short story. Come up with a harebrained idea. Do whatever it takes to stay engaged. On some days, your food for thought will be a movie, like Watchmen. On others, it’ll be a zen story you stumble upon in some corner of the internet. And sometimes, it’ll be a comic you find in your parents’ attic. Whatever you do, keep your mind open and your gears spinning. Make sure you look at life — at yourself, really — from a new angle every day.
Emptying your cup inspires true confidence. It leads to trust over skepticism. It welcomes, even initiates change, rather than sitting, waiting, fretting over what is to come. That’s how you handle uncertainty, how you keep reinventing yourself in a world that’ll keep turning until the end of time — and that’s why Bruce made the empty cup the very last of his striking thoughts:
I have to leave now, my friend. You have a long journey ahead of you, and you must travel light. From now on, drop all your burden of preconceived conclusions behind, and open yourself to everything and everyone ahead. Remember, my friend, the usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.
VI. The Door to the Unknown
It’s coming. Can you smell it? I can. Freedom. Freedom is fast approaching. Outdoor dining is bursting at the seams. Most of my friends have gotten their first dose. Some have booked festival tickets — festival tickets — for the fall.
Timelines will differ everywhere, but either way, our time in the stable is coming to an end. And oh, we are ready. Shuffling our feet, chafing at the bit, waiting to unleash the energy, the creativity, even the money we’ve had to store away. And yet, in the very back of our minds, a tiny suspicion remains: Am I actually ready? What’s gonna happen? What if I can’t handle it?
People always say, “This time is different,” but if you dig deep enough in the books of history, you’ll always find a situation that rhymes with today. There’ll always be diseases. Disasters. Large-scale catastrophes, born of human error. What is different about the times we say are different is that they offer, for most of us, a once-in-a-lifetime break: The chance to fundamentally, truly accept uncertainty as a necessary, important, meaningful feature of life. What we often dread and abhor as an outgrowth is actually part of the design. This time — like all the other times — is an opportunity to look at it and say: “I think it fits perfectly. This is where it belongs. With all its trauma and consequence.”
Will we finally drink the uncertainty milkshake? Or will we succumb to the whims of chaos once and for all? You may not think it matters. Looking only at one life — your life — in the grand scheme of things, it just might seem so. The truth is every individual that embraces uncertainty counts because whether or not we handle ambiguity well as a species depends on the parts of the sum — and that sum determines the future of generations.
Take a question everyone asks eventually: What is the meaning of life? In 1964, one year before he received the Nobel Prize in physics, Richard Feynman gave a talk at the Galileo Symposium in Italy. As part of his speech, he made a bold claim: The uncertainty inherent in this question is not what makes it dreadful — instead, it is part of the answer.
What then is the meaning of the whole world? We do not know what the meaning of existence is. We say, as the result of studying all of the views that we have had before, we find that we do not know the meaning of existence; but in saying that we do not know the meaning of existence, we have probably found the open channel — if we will allow only that, as we progress, we leave open opportunities for alternatives. We do not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth, but remain always uncertain. The English call it ‘muddling through,’ and although a rather silly, stupid sounding thing, it is the most scientific way of progressing. To decide upon the answer is not scientific.
In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar — ajar only. We are only at the beginning of the development of the human race; of the development of the human mind, of intelligent life — we have years and years in the future. It is our responsibility not to give the answer today as to what it is all about, to drive everybody down in that direction and to say: ‘This is a solution to it all.’ Because we will be chained then to the limits of our present imagination. We will only be able to do those things that we think today are the things to do. Whereas, if we leave always some room for doubt, some room for discussion, and proceed in a way analogous to the sciences, then this difficulty will not arise.
Gilda Radner, a pioneer in comedy and original cast member of Saturday Night Live, once said: “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”
In line with both her and his own reasoning to “leave the door to the unknown ajar,” Feynman very much lived his life this way. After the end of World War II, Feynman fell into depression. His high school sweetheart and father had died in quick succession, and the prospect of global nuclear war — the bombs behind which Feynman himself had contributed to in the Manhattan Project — made him feel as if everything was meaningless.
I would see people building a bridge, and I would say “they don’t understand.” I really believed that it was senseless to make anything because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway.
The Cold War was coming, global politics were unstable, and everyone suspected spies behind each corner. It was a time quite similar to today. Ultimately, what got Feynman over the hump was…curiosity. Learning. Delicious ambiguity.
Instead of accepting professorship offers from the likes of Princeton, UCLA, or Berkeley, Feynman took a research position at Cornell. He resigned to not knowing and re-committed to the spirit that drove him as a child. He said to himself:
I haven’t done anything important, and I’m never going to do anything important. But I used to enjoy physics and mathematical things, and because I used to play with them, it was in very short order [that I] worked out the things for which I later won the Nobel Prize.
The equations Feynman resolved are equations physicists still rely on today, more than 50 years later. How well you handle uncertainty matters. In 1981, seven years before he died, Feynman gave an interview for the BBC. Looking back on his life — and the question he posed all the way back in 1964 — he reaffirmed: Embracing uncertainty has made all the difference.
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things. But I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit; if I can’t figure it out, then I go onto something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell — possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
Like the pandemic 500 days ago, freedom is coming. Let it reach you but not get to you. Be brave. Be trusting. Open your mind.
Stay humble. Never stop learning. Look forward. Breathe. And don’t forget to empty your cup.