Uncertainty is a Fertile Place

By offering no guarantees, it offers space for reimagination

Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer is one of the defining books that started me on my journey. I have often heard the quote that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Maybe I was ready. I don’t know for what but when I read the book, something deep within me moved. It shifted a core part of me. To quote from the book:

Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world.

The more I thought about it, I realized that we have co-created our current world through our choices, our decisions, our intentions. Today’s crisis is a crisis of conscience and consciousness—across the board. The underlying narrative of today’s civilization glorifies profit, victory, growth, acquisitiveness, and competition above compassion, courage, curiosity, joy, grace, dignity. Everything that makes us human and humane have been rendered useless in this civilizational story.

This narrative is a strange monster that feeds on people’s vulnerability and devastates this beautiful planet—all for the sake of GDP and an ever-elusive growth. And that is considered legit. Outlandish laws and policies allow corporates to sue sovereign countries if they wish to protect their environment or their people. It is deemed ok to pay the least possible to extract the most from the poorest. All in the name of profit. For a few mega-corporate. For a few powerful individuals.

How did we let this happen? What choices did we make along the way that has brought us teetering to the edge of collapse? What must we let go of to transform?

Humans (the powerful and the privileged) have ravaged the earth to extract the riches hidden deep within her. Human hubris and greed have proved limitless. The Planet is imploding because we are in denial: denial of our limits, denial of nature, denial of different worldviews, and most importantly, the denials of our humanity and interconnectedness.

And those benefitting from the status quo would like us to stay in this limbo of denials—hating each other, fearing the unknown, grasping for more—polarized, insecure, joyless. Because joyless and hopeless people can’t dream of beauty, hope, dignity, love. The powerful fear beauty, compassion, hope. They fear solidarity. They abhor those they can’t manipulate. They detest those who won’t sell their souls.

To create beauty in the midst of horror is a form of defiance and subversion. It is a homage to the eternal human spirit that refuses to die. That the powers that be want the most to diminish, to destroy, to annihilate.

They have everything in control they say. We are just a few technological innovations away from paradise they say. Technology, in their world, is the panacea for all ills. Then, the pandemic happened. Illusions of growth and development shattered. The shards of broken dreams beneath the gloss and glitter became starkly evident. The façade of progress toppled. The world came to an eerie pause. The pause showed us there was no going back to ‘normal’. We need a Great Reset.

The pandemic—a point of discontinuity in the fabric of normal existence—ripped the veils off the illusions of normalcy. In all of this, the failure of leadership—across the board—stood out in stark relief. Uncertainty, ambiguity, and chaos reigned.

However, uncertainty can also be a fertile place of hope and possibilities. By offering no guarantees, it offers space for reimagination.

A time when the stability and the familiarity of the old is dissolving, a space hitherto unavailable opens up. Much like a blank canvas waiting for the brush strokes of the painter. Or a writer in front of a blank page.

The words we choose can heal or hurt. In the same way, the new narratives we create can heal our planet. The old narrative is still playing out, but it is in its death throes. Its beguiling magic is gone. Too many lives—human and more-than-human—are suffering for the benefit of a handful. The lessons we learn from it will shape our future. In this fertile space of the uncertain, what stories we choose to weave together will define the future.

Will we listen to the hitherto unheard, unseen, unacknowledged voices?

Humanity is at a fork in the road…

Do we want to return to the “normal as we knew it” or do we dare to dream of a different destiny?