I’ve been thinking a fair amount lately about what it means
to be uncertain. Anyone who has spent
time ‘here’ knows that things often do not happen when we want them to, or when
we think they are going to, or at the time for which they were planned. And sometimes, even after all this time, I
wonder why that is. There are lots of practical
reasons for that here in Maun. I’d like
to take a shower, but there’s no running water.
I’d like to buy some onions, but the government decided not to import
them any more. I’d like to make a phone
call, but the network just crapped out again.
So it isn’t always easy to count on the basics that we often take for
granted in the US, for one thing.
It’s also more than that.
A few years ago, I was running errands in town with a very
dear friend of mine. Among other things,
we were supposed to drop off some paperwork at an office where someone was
waiting for us. He called my friend’s
cell phone. She said we’d be right
there, just five minutes.
The thing is, we were nowhere near arriving in five
minutes. She knew that. I knew that.
And I could not for the life of me figure out why one would not just be
honest and give a realistic answer.
Although perhaps the easy answer is that no one expects things to run on
time here (or, as I told my students recently, “If something I plan happens
within, say, an hour or two of when I say it’s going to happen, that is
definitely on time.”).
But even more than the why, I wonder what uncertainty really
means and why it matters whether things happen on the schedule or now.
It seems to me that certainty comes more from a feeling than
a reality, from the notion that one ‘knows’ with some solidity what is
happening and when and why and how. I
wonder about this, in part, because isn’t certainty also illusory? How often have you been ‘sure’ about
something that turned out not to be true, or quite true? How many times have you invested in an idea
or a person that led you into more gray than black or white? I’m guessing, often. Probably more often than most of us like to
admit.
Which raises another question. Why does it matter so much for us to be
certain in the first place?
