The Beauty Of Uncertainty

Spending this one indoors in blissful contemplation of 12 months of changes, rather than outside in the biting wind, or pressed six-to-the-bar in eternal queues and new year's overpricing.

Buy turns interesting, suprising, shocking and reassuring, it's been quite a year, don't you think?

I chanced upon this writer (featured below), quoted in the sleavenotes for KT Tunstall's 'Acoustic Extravaganza'. In the closing hours of 2006 these words seem especially poignant.

Happy New Year to one and all.

Wherever you are.

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The Beauty of Uncertainty
by Brian Hendricks

'Doubt is not a pleasant situation, but certainty is absurd' - Voltaire

People with missing children. Children without parents. People without food or water. There are many who are destroyed by not knowing what the future holds.

For those of us more fortunate, the beauty of uncertainty is that it motivates us to seek certainty.

We are compelled to replace doubt with conviction, to replace confusion with clarity, to be more fearful of old ideas instead of new ones. Nothing is more disparaged than the person who is lost, hesitant, and anxious.

Yet the true path to fulfillment comes from these conditions. Uncertainty becomes truly beautiful when connected withthe certainty that there is a better life beyond the life that is known.

The artist, scientist, entrepreneur, athlete, and traveller: all embrace uncertainty as their muse. What is going to happen next is more enticing than what is happening now. The thrill of anticipation, the mystery of the unknown, the open road, mistakes as portals of discovery, the inevitability of change, purpose from chaos, questions leading to answers, failure as the threshold of knowledge. All of these conditions inform the life of the adventurer, the human being who is engaged in becoming.

The beauty of uncertainty is that it prepares us to embrace life in the face of death. Allows us the strength to deal with the freedom to choose. To willingly exchange the fear of uncertainty for the security of certainty is to admit defeat. To surrender to the fear of actually living your life.

As T. S Eliot observed, 'Where is the life we have lost in living?'

Nothing moves forward except by the craving to seek certainty from uncertainty.