I don’t know what will happen next

Early in the pandemic, literally in the first month, a friend shared with me something that was really helping them during that time of global uncertainty, which was that “I don’t have to know what to do next.”

Somehow, over time, and through this pandemic, this has morphed in my mind into:

I don’t know what will happen next.

Weirdly it has become a touchstone of comfort and relief these past few years. Every time I remind myself of this, I exhale a little.

There are two key reasons I can think of for this.

The first is that one of the ways we often gaslight ourselves is by telling ourselves “I should have known.”

I should have known this would happen. I should have know they would say that. I should have know this was a bad idea.

And then we can end up expending a great deal of energy torturing ourselves by trying to predict the future, or plan for every possible (negative) outcome so we are not caught off guard.

It’s exhausting.

Letting go of knowing what will happen next is a relief.

Also, it’s impossible to know what will happen next.

Yes sometimes we can guess, or run models that provide us with a pretty good prediction.

But if we actually knew with certainty what would happen next, how awful would that be?

Gone would be spontaneity, creativity, innovation, joy and agency!

Knowing that we don’t know what will happen next also creates the ONLY certainty - uncertainty. Uncertainty is certain. And so we can plan and design for it.

In fact, any system that doesn’t plan or design for uncertainty is a system that doesn’t recognize our collective humanity - it’s a system that is oppressive.

As we wrap up this year, the third in a global pandemic, I invite you to think about how you can plan for more human-ness, more uncertainty, more mistakes, learning and growth and more time for recovery in our individual and collective lives.

What might that look like? What might that feel like? What might that be like?

Not knowing what will happen next can open the door to imagining what could happen next.

Banner photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

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