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The only thing we can be certain of is that life will bring us heaps of uncertainty. Life stability is not a matter of preventing uncertainty, but dealing with it appropriately and effectively.
Don't Fight Insecurity, Get Comfortable with It
There's a lot to love about life. For example, I just ate a delicious breakfast. But life is also dark and miserable at times. Furthermore, father time eventually crushes every person, and it's never pretty.
With how fragile our lives are, insecurity about the future is inevitable. Some may think that the best response is to fight it, to do everything in their power to get to a point of complete comfort and security. Don't do this.
If you fight against feelings of insecurity, doubt, and uncertainty, all you do is increase their impact on your life. To give you a stupid example, what if you hated grass more than anything in the world? What if you obsessed over destroying all of the grass you saw? Well, grass would become a HUGE problem in your life because there's more grass than you can ever remove.
You will never remove all of the uncertainties of the future. You must live with them.
It's best for grass and uncertainty haters to learn to live with them. Furthermore, what else do you think a grass hater would do? They would probably stay inside because the grass outside overwhelms them. In the same way, people who won't tolerate uncertainty avoid it at a great cost.
Anyone who avoids uncertainty avoids life itself! It means you won't take chances. You won't travel. You won't ask yourself or others uncomfortable questions. You will shelter yourself to the point of internal death of your soul.
What if, instead of that, you learned to tolerate uncertainty? Ironically, that would increase your life stability.
What Life Stability Actually Is
It's reasonable but incorrect to think of life stability as we think of stability in physics. Stable things in physics are defined by their predictability and lack of mobility. Life stability, however, is an internal barometer that is more defined by our thoughts and feelings than our objective circumstances (though both matter).
Our actions don't have a direct relationship with life stability. Consider traveling.
Traveling is a risk. It's more dangerous than staying at home, expensive, and you're more vulnerable away than you would be staying at home. Traveling sounds like the precise opposite of life stability. And in one sense, that's true. But the inherent instability of travel is exactly why it can improve your sense of internal stability!
Traveling when you could stay home is a statement. You have chosen to coexist with uncertainty and even embrace it. Think about how many people feel when they travel...
- Free
- Alive
- Connected
- Happy
- Confident
- and even... Stable!
Travel is just one example of this vital concept: Actions that demonstrate comfort with uncertainty or instability are key to maintaining internal life stability. It's surprising, but life stability can be improved by purposefully taking chances.
The surprising key to life stability is to embrace all of the insecurities, doubts, and instability that will always be part of our existence.
Instability comes when we fight against an immovable object. No matter how hard we fight, uncertainty persists. This strains our emotional and mental resources for a pointless fight. It seems logical to fight for something as desirable as certainty, but how logical is it to fight a fight you can never win?
I'm not saying you need to get excited about uncertainty. Obviously it isn't fun to have financial uncertainty, or health problems for example. It's more about gaining a respect and understanding of how uncertain all of life is, and doing your best with that information instead of trying to deny it or change its nature.
Cheers,
Stephen Guise
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