A Purpose in Uncertainty.

A Purpose in Uncertainty

"People say they’re having a 'garbage day' like it’s a bad thing." -Oscar the Grouch

Life is full of complexity and abnormality. It is difficult to look to the future and imagine something different. 

Change is one of those things that causes me unpleasantness at times. The first days of traveling, I know I need time to adjust and acclimate. New routines. New places. An unfamiliarity with my surroundings. Despite all the advanced planning, I often feel unsettled by too many unknowns.

In 1986, Janet Jackson released the song “Control.” Whenever I hear the song, I am reminded of the power of control in our lives. Jackson sings, 

I'm in control, never gonna stop

Control, to get what I want

Control, I like to have a lot

Control, now I'm all grown up

When people feel more in control of their lives, people are generally happier, more optimistic and healthier. 

We like change we can control. We resist change that we can’t control. People don’t like change that is forced on them. The status quo is always easier than change.

To embrace change requires a risk. This can be frightening. 

Is there any benefit from risk, unpredictability and uncertainty? In his book Antifragility: Things that Gain From Disorder, Nassim Taleb writes about the idea of antifragility. Taleb writes: 

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

Taleb believes people can benefit from uncertainty. Uncertainty and unpredictability can be helpful. 

How do we cope with uncertainty? It depends on the person interpreting it. Good and bad things happen usually for the reasons we give to them. 

Black swan events are rare and unpredictable events that have severe consequences. These events usually come as a surprise (e.g. September 11, 2001) and have severe, extreme, and dire impacts on society or the world. In hindsight, the events become analyzed and oversimplified, as people try to discern why no one predicted them beforehand. 

Unforeseen life altering events (black swan events) contain the possibility of something positive. It is based on perspective.

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In 1967 Katherine Switzer registered for the Boston Marathon using only the first initial of her first name followed by her last name. This allowed her to successfully register for the Boston Marathon. First begun in 1897, the Boston Marathon was for men only. 

Excluding women was not uncommon. Many Ivy League colleges didn’t start to admit women until the 1960s.Yale began admitting women in 1968. Princeton in 1969, and Dartmouth finally admitted women in 1972. 

The race official Jock Semple ran out on the course and attacked Switzer to remove her from the race. Switzer’s boyfriend at the time, body checked Semple away from Switzer. She finished the 26.2 miles and was the first woman to do so in 70 years. 

Women were finally able to officially compete in the Boston Marathon five years later. 

In the early 19th century, voting in the United States was reserved for white men. After the U.S. Civil War and the passage of the 15th Amendment, all men were granted suffrage. All women, regardless of race or ethnicity, wouldn’t be able to vote until 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

However, the years after Reconstruction and continuing into the 20th century women and men of color who lived in the Jim Crow South endured a long and arduous fight for equal rights. Legalized segregation would not be ended until 1964. The right to vote would not be secured until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Housing discrimination was banned in 1968.

As historian and author Dr. Keisha Blaine noted about living in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era:

In Mississippi by 1960, 75 percent of all families in the Delta were living below the federal poverty line of $3,000 per year. The economic conditions matched the lack of political power held by black Mississippians during this period. And so it’s not surprising to take a look at the statistics from this moment to see that only 5 percent of Mississippi’s black residents were registered to vote. Five percent of an estimated 450,000 black people in the state of Mississippi could not vote. And the reasons they could not vote is because they were being blocked and they were being blocked intentionally. White supremacists were using violence and intimidation to keep black people from the polls, as well as there were a number of state policies which kept black people from the vote, such as literacy tests.   

Civil Rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and helped organize Freedom Summer to mobilize voter registration. She challenged the violence, disenfranchisement and segregation endured by millions.

Fannie Lou Hamer

She experienced economic insecurity, undereducation, was surgically sterilized without her consent, and so badly beaten by police that it left her with permanent damage. 
Hamer endured and courageously worked to change it.

How do you persevere? Dr. Belinda Kendall recently wrote recently, “Perseverance is the power that fuels our becoming.”

She also highlighted the power of perseverance by sharing the following:

“When you said you’re homeless, I showed you Tyler Perry and Tiffany Haddish. When you said you thought you couldn’t get past a dark place, I showed you Jennifer Hudson. You said you were nothing more than a drug addict, I showed you Samuel L. Jackson. You said your appearance would hinder your opportunities, I showed you Lizzo. When you said life was over because you were HIV+, I showed you Magic Johnson. You said you weren’t strong enough to persevere, I showed you Chadwick Boseman. You said your father wasn’t around and your mom struggled, I showed you Lebron James.You said you should give up after losing the biggest opportunity of your life, I showed you Stacey Abrams. You said no one would listen because of your speech impediment, I showed you Amanda Gorman.” 

Perseverance powers becoming.

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We can hold a pessimistic view of the world, but be optimistic about things we have control over. We can be socially pessimistic, yet individually optimistic about our future.

Derek Thompson recently wrote in The Atlantic, “Individual hope and national despair are not contradictions. For now, they form the double helix of the American spirit.” 

People are generally pretty good when bad things happen. We generally bounce back and recover. 

Learned optimism involves explaining events to ourselves in ways that help rather than distort our thinking.This explanatory style develops into a positive internal dialogue where people believe that the causes of setbacks are temporary and changeable. 

The explanation we give to ourselves becomes constructive rather than destructive. 

Rebecca Solnit has researched how communities arise in disaster. Throughout history, in many crises, constructiveness has emerged from destruction. She notes that during the lockdowns of Covid and throughout other catastrophes, people learn that meaningful positive change is possible.  

As Solnit has said, “Disasters shake us up.” During crises people share something-their common humanity. A sense of togetherness develops. A deep sense of ‘communitarian fellowship’ emerges out of shared suffering and sacrifice. Empathy secures deep emotional connections with neighbors and people that may not have existed prior. Opportunity arises from disaster. People see what is broken and rebuild together.

Solnit wrote the following about life in the worst of the Covid years: 

“The word “crisis” means, in medical terms, the crossroads a patient reaches, the point at which she will either take the road to recovery or to death. The word “emergency” comes from “emergence” or “emerge”, as if you were ejected from the familiar and urgently need to reorient. The word “catastrophe” comes from a root meaning a sudden overturning….At moments of immense change, we see with new clarity the systems – political, economic, social, ecological – in which we are immersed as they change around us. We see what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s corrupt, what matters and what doesn’t…[what] we call the status quo-it seems to be stable, and those who benefit from it often insist that it’s unchangeable. Then it changes fast and dramatically, and that can be exhilarating, terrifying, or both.”

As Canadian psychiatrist J.T. MacCurdy has written in his book The Structure of Morale, “The morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors.”

Researchers have labeled our ability to overcome trauma and grow from tragedy as post-traumatic growth. When faced with a major life challenge or trauma, people can not only recover but thrive developing a renewed sense of meaning. 

This isn’t to suggest that all life traumas are good. Or that there isn’t suffering endured. Or that all adversity is good. Nor is post-traumatic growth universal.

But, adversity can make us stronger. How we interpret adversity helps us to cope more effectively and constructively with future hardship. This isn’t easy. Real world problems don’t often confine themselves to manageable boundaries. 

Positivity and optimism are not about avoiding negativity or hardship. Optimists are not immune to the suffering in the world. But optimism can protect us from stress, anxiety, and depression. Optimism does this by fostering problem-solving and thought-catching, helping us to evaluate the validity of our automatic thoughts as they arise.

Optimism is about perception. Optimism is a way of reacting to events in our lives with confidence in our ability to affect change. Optimists search for ways to turn the lemons thrown at them into lemonade. Optimism allows us to have faith.

Seeing is believing. I share the following example with my students about the power of change and belief amidst uncertainty. Slow positive changes are in fact, change.

This photo shows the first human flight in 1903. 

The next photo was 66 years later. Within a lifetime. The difference in time between these two photos is only 66 years!

A human being was sent to space. Then while orbiting the moon, took another ship and landed on the moon! Then Neil Armstrong walked on the surface of the moon. And it was televised into people’s living rooms!

Lastly, this is the photo of the famed Mars Rover Perseverance landing on the surface of Mars in 2021. The difference in years between the first photo and the last is only 118 years. 

In over 100 years human beings have sent a machine to Mars! And it has flown a drone helicopter on Mars. And that machine communicates with me via computer from another planet. In my lifetime I have seen the surface of another planet!

And I love receiving messages from Perseverance (albeit NASA) in my Twitter feed. Just like this one:

So believe in the positive possibilities of the human spirit. Believe in what Dr. Kendall wrote, "Perseverance powers becoming."

Doing so doesn’t make you a naive idealist. It makes you human. It also might make you stronger.

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For further reading:

•The Way We Get Through This is Together Amid this unfolding disaster, we have seen countless acts of kindness and solidarity. It’s this spirit of generosity that will help guide us out of this crisis and into a better future. By Rebecca Solnit https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/mutual-aid-coronavirus-pandemic-rebecca-solnit

•Democracy Entails Conflict Democracy is a system of politics that has disagreement at its heart. But how do we stop conflicts becoming destructive? By Rochelle DuFord https://aeon.co/essays/what-types-of-conflict-are-good-for-democracy