UNCERTAINTY/POSSIBILITY I

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I dwell on uncertainty a lot. It is what gives most of us our anxiety, as self-aware and fragile beings. We don’t know what comes next, everything we hold dear and secure can disappear in a flash, and yet we must live with a certain amount of optimism, to look forward and to plan for a future.

There are umpteen philosophers who tell us that living in the moment and being present are the best ways to handle the absurdity of it all. I feel this to be sound, but it is also often at odds with the necessity of planning and constructing a life. The balancing of living in the present and savouring what is, to the fullest, with the necessity of planning and constructing a life is incredibly difficult, if not impossible if you are a human who acknowledges one’s own frailties and doubts. So what gives an existentialist, or frankly, anybody intent on not living in a delusion, a way to keep at it?

I think it is the idea of possibility.

I see this in how Albert Camus talks about the pause in the Sisyphean journey he finds solace in (a pause I explored in a few pieces including this one), in Bertrand Russell’s insistence on valuing uncertainty as a mechanism to invite creativity, and in Audre Lorde’s insistence on joy in the face of injustice.

This work is an expression of those thoughts, voiced in wonderful ways well before I am articulating my version: that uncertainty is the design of being and we may as well accept it because it doesn’t care if we don’t; but, in that effort at acceptance, we may find that possibility can be the basis for a thoughtful optimism.

Part of a series. The linen has frayed edges which are not fully captured in the photos.

36h x 36w x 0.75d (inches); acrylic and linen on wood-backed canvas