To find hope: accept uncertainty.
Before COVID19 appeared, many people were already sliding towards despair. Economic pressures, leadership vacuums and a world becoming more and more dehumanised had most of us wondering where to find hope. One client told me that “it feels as if someone has pulled a dark, heavy blanket over this company”. Now, as we collectively face a global pandemic, the question of finding hope has become more salient and poignant.
We live in a world where paradoxically change is simultaneously too little and too slow and too much and too fast. We long for a cure or vaccine for COVID19 and transformative change in our socio-political landscape; for economies to turn around; for gender equality and a cure for cancer … none of these seem to be happening fast enough. At the same time, we are bombarded by disruptions on multiple levels: from the big existential threat that comes with facing a pandemic and looming climate change, to increasing socio-political volatility and fears of a global economic collapse as be bunker down in our homes to “flatten the curve”.
In many ways I feel as if I have “lost my moorings”, like I am adrift in turbulent white water and that I am not sure where to find solid ground. Being confined to my home, familiar routines have dissolved. Many days there is only my screen and one call after the other; interacting with others, but the disintermediation of the screen making it a draining, not uplifting experience. Collectively we long for “normality”, but what does normal even mean now? I think for many “normal” is a euphemism for certainty, stability and predictability. Uncertainty, unpredictability and instability are seen as temporary, something to survive through until we get to back to “normal”. I think the reality that we collectively needing to face is that this is simply not the case. This is the new “normal”.
On a call today, a psychotherapist said that we need to understand that we are all in the process of being traumatised. Trauma, in his definition is being confronted with more stimuli (or information) than we are able to process or digest. In a way it is like being in a car crash that is happening in slow motion, the trauma is unfolding but we have no idea if we will only be bruised by the inevitable brutality, or if we will be seriously injured or killed. The stress of not knowing something so critical is too much for us to manage, it is too much to process. So we mobilise our defenses, for some it is denial, for others control. For me, it is compartmentalising. We all have different coping mechanisms.
For me, the most profound question in this is where do I find meaning in all of this? Where do I find hope?
It is in this context that I came across this wonderful piece by Rebecca Solnit, reminding me again that hope comes not from certainty, but from embracing uncertainty …
“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”
It may seem counter-intuitive, but our hope and sense of agency comes from accepting and even embracing uncertainty. I don’t have answers for how to do this, but one piece of advice is to simply “walk with the uncertainty”, to accept the discomfort of it as the new normal and to not deny or fight our feelings. Be with your feelings; name them and acknowledge them. Fight the virus (or whatever other giant we are facing), not your feelings.
Finally, have compassion with yourself and others. We are all being confronted with this unfolding trauma and we are all responding differently, often from fairly “primitive places”. We need each other now more than ever before, even as we are physically isolated from each other.
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