The Uncertainties of Age

Not knowing may be more useful in the end.

Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash

From the time I was 12 years old, I knew exactly what I wanted to do in life. What a pity that I was wrong.

My ambition was to become a newspaper reporter in the footsteps of role models Mark Twain and Clark Kent. In single-minded pursuit of this goal, I worked on my school newspapers in junior high school, high school, and college. In high school I was a stringer for the local daily, earning the princely sum of 25-cents per column inch. I interned for daily newspapers for three summers during college. It all paid off when I landed a reporting job on a highly regarded daily in Florida. Three years later, my newspaper career was over. It turned out not to be a love match.

I was thinking about the certainty of my youth as I read a recent book called Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, by Maggie Jackson. Her thesis is that when we are certain, we are likely to be wrong (as my own experience demonstrates). “Humans spend much of their time jumping to conclusions based on cognitive shortcuts honed from what has worked in the past,” she writes. In the interests of efficiency, or just impatience, we quickly go with certainty to an answer that we know is correct from experience. Taking that shortcut relieves us of the burden of thinking about the question again, or even of considering an alternative to our certainty.

Being uncertain, on the other hand, leaves our mind open to explore other alternatives, “propelling people in challenging times toward good judgment, flexibility, mutual understanding, and heights of creativity.” In fact, Jackson makes a case that “it is uncertainty that equips us to envision the unimaginable, adjust to the unexpected, value a question as deeply as an answer, and find strength in difference and in difficulty.”

Uncertain Times

It’s helpful to know that uncertainty can be so valuable – especially since elderhood seems rife with it.

We leave the certainty of working for set hours, a regular paycheck, and the camaraderie of co-workers, only to step, like Wile E. Coyote on the cliff’s edge, into the abyss of what comes after work. Do we continue working part-time? Do we travel? Do we volunteer? Do we tend to the rose bushes? We may think we know the answer with certainty, and we may be right. Or not.

We do our best to be parents to our adult children, even as they make decisions that we find foolish, dangerous, or beyond our comprehension. Is there certainty in the role we should play? What is the best way to navigate the evolving, shifting relationships between parent and child?

We lose a parent, a partner, a child, a best friend. Relationships that were solid certainties in our lives disappear, leaving us with questions we never had to face before. How do we mourn? How do we continue to live?

We know for certain that we will age in place in our own homes. Are we ignoring the inevitable? By clinging to a fixed answer, are we missing an opportunity to enjoy a better life in a community?

The Wisdom of Not Knowing

Jackson offers the refreshing notion that uncertainty is, rather than something to fear, a positive place from which to make thoughtful decisions. “Most of thought and life itself is the pursuit of resolution,” she writes. “Yet along the way, it is uncertainty that equips us to envision the unimaginable, adjust to the unexpected, value a question as deeply as an answer, and find strength in difference and in difficulty.”

An ancient philosopher supports her position. Socrates is famous for saying, “All I know is that I know nothing.”

Uncertainty is also similar to what teachers of meditation and mindfulness call “beginner’s mind,” a mind that lets go of assumptions and sees everything as if it were for the first time. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the most prominent writers on  mindfulness, writes that beginner’s mind “allows us to be receptive to new possibilities. It prevents us from getting stuck in the rut of our own expertise, which often thinks it knows more than it does.” 

As older adults, we have enough experience – including the experience of living through momentous change – that we can afford to take a step back, acknowledge what we do not know, and carefully explore the many alternatives before us. Ironically, when we are older, it may be easier to adopt beginner’s mind - the child-like openness to wonder and possibility.

Perhaps Bob Dylan said it best. In a song about changing his viewpoint from seeing a world of good and evil to acknowledging shades of gray, he sang, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”