This is sort of a follow-up to my essay on certainty. I’m trying to articulate what it is I find so attractive about uncertainty, and what I find not repulsive but just… disconcerting about certainty. Or what I find unattractive about certainty, or why it bothers me in a lot of areas.

Having a stance of uncertainty and embracing uncertainty carries with it, or inherently requires, an openness to life, or just a curiosity about life. If your stance is certainty about things, then you are saying, “I am sure of how things are, and that they can only be this way.” You’re closing yourself to a conversation with the world around you, because if you’re saying, “This is how things are, and I know that for sure, and there’s no room for discussion,” then that’s literally it: there’s no room for discussion. You’re stopping the conversation and the interaction between yourself and the world around you, whether that’s people you might discuss something with, or just being open to being changed by the world, open to accepting into yourself things outside of yourself, things that happen or that are in the world.

On the other hand, uncertainty is an invitation to conversation, to interaction and relationship with the world around you. You are saying, “Hey, I think this, but I’m not sure, and I’m open to reality being different,” or open to other perspectives, or open to being wrong. That invites conversation and interaction, and connection.

That conversation can be literal or metaphorical.

If you express uncertainty and openness, you are literally more likely to find yourself in interesting conversations with other humans, because they’ll notice that you’re a person who wants to discuss ideas. And that’s good!

But that conversation may also be a metaphorical one with the world around you. Being open to being changed by the world, while at the same time changing the world around you – putting yourself out into the world and inviting it into you in return.

So maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s that if you’re closed to uncertainty, if you’re saying, “Oh, no, I’m certain,” then you are closed to interaction and connection. And to me that is fundamentally dead. There’s a missing sense of eros, erotic energy – not in a sexual sense, but in a life energy sense. Because there’s nothing to do there. There’s no life and movement in certainty.

So maybe then a key value of uncertainty is that it is an invitation to life, an invitation to exchange and connection. Because connection is hard without an exchange. Connection is hard without give and take: I offer you this thought and you take it into yourself, and you offer me this other thought and I take it into myself. Whether I take it and believe it, or take it and even just consider it and play with it.

Uncertainty invites play. You can play with an idea! You can try an idea on and consider, “Okay, what would the world be like if I believed this, or you believed that?” That’s a powerful form of play.

Uncertainty is an invitation to play with me. Uncertainty is me saying I’m a live actor, someone you can engage with, as opposed to a certain, set-in-stone, can’t-be-engaged-with person. Mostly intellectual play, I guess, but that’s also an invitation to intimacy. Because if we can share ideas and sort of touch each other’s minds with them, that’s extremely intimate.

And so I think I value that. Of course, a funny thing about all this is that I’m sort of saying, “Hey, I’m certain that uncertainty is good, and I’m certain that certainty is bad.” So obviously this concept has its limits, though I’m not sure how to articulate why it does. Which in itself is maybe a demonstration of uncertainty, because I think it has its limits, but I’m not sure how to articulate that, because I’m not sure that it does have its limits!

And to go along with this, I’m not saying that believing something is bad. For me there’s a distinction between belief and certainty, or between thinking something and being certain of it. So I tend to, in my head at least, think of things in terms of, “Hey, I strongly suspect XYZ,” as opposed to, “I am certain about X, Y, and Z.” To me those are very, very different. “I strongly suspect this,” or, “I’m pretty sure about this, but I am aware, at least on some level, that I could be wrong, and I’m open to changing.” Changing my mind almost feels suggestive of changing from one certainty to another, but I really mean I’m open to adjusting my thoughts on something, or perhaps recalibrating.