The feeling of uncertainty has been plaguing me. I think using the word plaguing might indicate this is an artifact of the pandemic aftermath. I have surveyed that I am not alone, and that many of us are feeling in over our heads as far as understanding our current times. There is so much going on in the world, and in each of our individual lives. If it feels more difficult than ever to know where you are and where to go from here, I trust you are not without many heartfelt companions in this. It can feel impossible to fully process everything at a rate that matches its rate of development. And so, we are beautifully floundering together in the unknown.
By floundering I really mean skillfully surviving and adapting with admirable bravery.
The word plague usually indicates contagiousness, fever and delirium. Sometimes I do find myself with a heightened temperature, perhaps just metaphorically or energetically, and transient disorientation, due to this agent of uncertainty replicating in my system. I fear spreading the inconvenience of uncertainty to others, but it seems we are all here unmasked together. Maybe even inoculated with protection against it.
It’s 2024 and uncertainty still feels new to me. In hindsight I am seeing that for quite a while, I had this innocent feeling that everything was certain, and it was a source of comfort. Maybe part of the pandemic aftermath is knowing that we were all hit with this very unpredictable, life-threatening, life-altering event that showed us the future is not guaranteed to be a certain way.
(It’s ok to not be done processing the pandemic even as life moves forward).
When I feel discontent, I observe a pattern of first letting the uncomfortable feelings really bother me as they express their desire to be felt, wanting them to just pass already so I can be just fine. When that of course doesn’t work, my next move is to allow everything to be as it is, without needing to change. Without needing to understand. Without it being about my identity. This is difficult, but an extremely effective practice I am learning through meditation and therapy. And it is precisely where everything shifts. Because at some point after that, a dormant healing mechanism awakens, some inner elixir that cracks alive like a glow stick and causes me to completely flip my view of the whole thing and open up to the immaculate beauty of it. Right now I am appreciating this beauty of uncertainty.
Why am I writing about this in my newsletter about creative well-being?
Well, this year so far, this feeling of uncertainty, at times, has truly eclipsed my emotional strength and physical availability to make art. Questions have been surfacing such as… what is this for?
I am feeling now that the uncertainty feeling puts me in survival mode and makes me forget the deeper reasons I make my art. And so recently, in a turn of inner events, I have been inspired to turn the uncertainty into fuel for my art-making. And using art-making as a way to process the confusion.
Feel the uncertainty and make the art anyway.
Or make it with even more fervor because of it.
So the future is uncertain. It’s uncertain! This is great news! This actually makes the most sense. The unfathomable beauty of the uncertainty is that it reinforces the higher truth - that we are only here in the present. And what does that mean? Total creative freedom. What more could one want? From this view, uncertainty is actually the very best thing, and very certain if you ask me.
This doesn’t mean it’s not scary or the discomfort is gone forever, but it offers something else.
Making art and doing our practices amidst the weirdness of the world we are in is not meaningless escape. These are acts of integration, ways of being submerged only in the one moment we truly have, and then the next, in that order. And not expecting anything in return. That’s important. Expressing our energy in the form of art doesn’t have to be for anything other than to explore the current moment. What it is for? It’s for now. The rest will come later. Or will it? It doesn’t matter, just make your art now.
Allowing ourselves to comfortably be in our creative practices can be greatly helped by an attitude of trust and surrender. This is what is keeping me going right now. Trust doesn’t mean that everything will be ok according to my own dreamy idealizations of what ok is. Trust means I know I’m being led with grace in alignment even if it’s all unknown. Especially if it’s all unknown. The unknown becomes known, revealed in tasty little increments. For now I’m not going to worry about it. But I am going to allow myself the rich joy I find in forming relationships with natural colors and communicating through their language with shapes because these things bring me a kind of comfort and meaning that certainty never could.
With you in the unpredictable magic,
♡ Kristen
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I needed this today. Thank you for sharing.