on uncertainty

an induction

I was asked by the students in Sigma Tau Delta, the national English Honors Society, to give the speech at their annual induction ceremony, and I gave it last night. I’m going through some upheaval in my life—professional, not personal—and I wrote this as much for myself as I did for them. It gave me some comfort, and I wanted to share it here because I thought it might comfort you too.

When I received the request to give this induction, I started thinking of what I would write about, and the word I heard in my head was “uncertainty.” I’ve always thought of writing as an intuitive, alchemical kind of process. An image, or idea occurs to me, and then my brain is able to use words to turn the idea into something deeper—more than it was before—maybe even entirely different from what prompted it. This is the beauty of language—the power that it offers us to give form to the formless. Language is what sets humans apart from every other species. It is an incredible gift from God or nature or both.

I had these ideas about uncertainty bouncing around in my head for about a week. I wanted to speak about uncertainty because I know what college students face these days—both with their personal and professional lives. It is a fact of the human condition that everything is uncertain, but very rarely will it feel more uncertain than between the ages of 18-22.

I’m fundamentally an optimist, meaning that I’m always trying to take something difficult and reframe it into something positive. I had a lot of positive things to say to you about uncertainty, and then I received some news that made my own future uncertain, and suddenly, my positivity felt forced. It’s easier to offer platitudes to someone else than it is to offer them to yourself.

When my friend, the poet Maggie Smith, was going through the process of divorce, she started writing little notes to herself on social media to inspire her. These notes went viral and became her best-selling book, Keep Moving. Last Friday, one of them popped up in her memories, and she texted me a screenshot of it.

That question, “What can we do to give our future selves the best chance at happiness?” struck me, and suddenly, I was able again to see uncertainty for what it is—a gift. We can never know where the future will take us. We can’t know whether we’ll fall in love with the right person, or publish that bestseller, or have children, or own a house in the woods beside a creek. Nothing is ever certain, but contained within that uncertainty, there is always going to be possibility. And with possibility, there is hope. 

You students sit in this room, and have your entire lives ahead of you. You have more opportunity to make the right decisions for your future happiness than any of the faculty here do. And though life is uncertain, what is certain is that you will, at times, make the wrong decisions. There is no way around that, so the best thing you can do is to reframe it.

In Letters to A Young Poet, Rilke wrote, “Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”

None of us can know the exact answers that will take us down the right path to happiness. There will be forks in each of our roads every, single day. All we can do is, as Rilke says, learn to live the questions. We can reframe the uncertainty—stop seeing it as something to be feared, and instead, see the joy contained within it. Vincent Van Gogh once said, “If I cease searching, then, woe is me, I am lost. That is how I look at it - keep going, keep going come what may.”

When you get home, I want you to take a moment and think of your studies and your future. I want you to ask yourself the question, “What else is possible?” Sit with that question and really feel it. You might not have an answer right now, but you don’t need an answer if you’re living the question. If you’re living the question, the answer will find you.

For further reading, I recommend Maggie’s poem Threshold