Uncovering the creative response to uncertainty

Just as things were appearing to get back to normal, the troubling new Covid variant, Omicron, is threatening to upend our return to regular life. Our hardened minds are beginning to fear for the future and a familiar and lived-in uncertainty is back.

Even as we wait for clarity about the severity of the Omicron threat, maybe this is the right time to ask whether there is a way of being or an approach that will help us navigate the uncertainty of our times and emerge as thriving individuals and communities through the pandemic and after it.

Of course, pausing for reflection is a big ask at this juncture. Our fears and worries about the situation are not unfounded and the memories of the Delta havoc are too close to the skin. There are too many of us who don’t have the mental space or the privilege to step back and take stock of how best to respond. While this is valid, the shutting out of our fears and anxieties, our numbing and overwhelming, triggered by the unfolding situations around us, is also not a great option. It’s very much the old “rock and hard place” story.

So, if one is able to do this now, it may be worthwhile approaching a mostly unacknowledged need as we go through life — finding out how to live with uncertainty and face the chaos within, rather than turn away from it.

An artist friend recently mentioned in passing, during a snatch of a conversation, that the making of art was like life itself — inherently uncertain. That is why he made art, he said, instead of doing other things. It struck me in the writing of this piece that in some ways, the uncertainty caused by the pandemic has nudged us all to function like artists.

We too have been forced to embark on a journey of not knowing in order to make something. In fact, we have been called to consciously create our very lives in a situation that is not under our control at all beyond our responses to it.

In the usual course, we feel armed to tackle the vicissitudes of life from the vantage of knowing. By assuming a position of knowing and knowing best, we are able to go through uncertain situations with an imagined sense of security. But this position can be a kind of self-deception, as the pandemic has shown us.

In this hour, there is an unvarnished clarity about our condition here that may have eluded us in the past. Therefore, we are right when we think of our normalcy as unstable now. It is a normalcy shot through with reality. The reality of living in an uncertain world. Of not knowing what will happen next.

Maybe our best ally in the face of these opposite pulls of not knowing and the desire to conquer with knowledge isn’t an assumed certainty, but something else we’re not used to employing. It’s something like an openness to the situation and all that it will bring, including the feelings of insecurity that must inevitably well-up. Maybe it’s being able to recognise that we have within us this faculty that is capable of turning towards the light without rejecting the darkness within, a quality of aliveness that does not need us to deny our brokenness, a ground that remains whole through the awareness of being hollowed out.

Maybe digging deep to make contact with this is what will allow us to become assimilated into our situations, allow us to go beyond our known responses of fear, anxiety and panic, as we are seeing with respect to Omicron in some quarters, and function beyond the categories of what is good and bad for us, or what we will lose or find. Much like the artist who must give into the process of creation completely without reserve, maybe we too have to learn to act without leaving any residue behind, rather than stand separate from the situation or try to fix it from the outside based on what we want and don’t want. Perhaps this is what a creative response to uncertainty really looks like. Life living itself fully, a total embrace.