The merits of embracing uncertainty
Staring in the face of ambiguity nurtures growth as much as it creates indecision. A book by a charismatic Bohemian-Austrian poet serves as today's guide into the unknown.
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“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart....live in the question”- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
With the word ‘uncertainty’ curiously emblazoned on the title, you could be forgiven for expecting a series of emotional ramblings on the current precarious state of global affairs because of a certain spiked protein. But we’ve got enough melancholy hovering over humanity and this isn’t one of those essays.
I want to offer a counterweight to presiding public sentiment around the notion of uncertainty. About how our attitudes and occasional derision towards uncertainty or the concept of ‘not knowing’ deserve at the very least a momentary reflective pause. Our fear of the uncertain has been exhaustively and feverishly documented but there is much to say about embracing this liminal feeling of unease. I’ve been fascinated by the subject not only because of its inherent contrarian slant but also because of a little-known book I recently had the pleasure of savouring. A book that blithely cuts into the social underpinnings of uncertainty whilst somehow never intending to do so.
Letters to a Young Poet (original title, in German: Briefe an einen jungen Dichter) is a collection of ten artfully written letters by Bohemian-Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) to Franz Xaver Kappus (1883–1966), a then 19-year-old officer cadet at the Theresian Military Academy. Whilst the compilation has been lauded as a classic effervescent exchange between a seasoned poet and his understudy on artistic authenticity, it also offers a lesson on confronting human assumptions of what it means to ‘not know’. But first, some background.
Kappus corresponded with the popular poet and author from 1902 to 1908, seeking his advice on poetry writing, and in deciding between a literary career or a career as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. There is a charming humility to how Rilke addresses some of Kappus’ core anxieties in seeking a ‘right’ career pathway. He conveys his wisdom with clever wit and subtlety without ever appearing to impose or patronise. This book would also serve as an excellent text for those wanting to observe how true mentors chaperone their students through the vicissitudes of life. But that is for another essay.
Kappus's sporadic letters tracked Rilke around Europe as he went from Paris to Rome to Sweden; 10 letters over six years. Rilke was a prodigious letter-writer and it showed in the literary quality of his prose, but even more fascinating, and an aspect rarely talked about, was his composed and matter-of-fact approach to grappling with uncertainty and the unknown. These smatterings of eternal wisdom appear nonchalantly expressed and unplanned but that is precisely why they remain impactful.
There was a particular sonnet in the exchange, one written by Kappus himself that serves as a telling piece of evidence on how the unknown invites us to understand ones immediate reality through a lens of introspection:
"Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours."
This wasn’t just about Rilke delivering apophthegms ex cathedra. He explores the value of the unknown as a clarifying force for our own interior lives. Throughout the book, Rikle turns his illuminating gaze to the vast episodes in life that remain opaque to ourselves because we fear the prospect of loosing control. We start mentally eulogising the absence of a coherent narrative, answer or explanation because, as Rikle states, we are institutionally and culturally programmed to do so.
“Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent”
Rilke argues that only by cultivating that basic capacity to be alone with our own experience of not knowing are we able to notice those otherwise imperceptible yet utterly transformative shifts in our growth as humans. Whilst acknowledging the unknown as a ‘lonely experience’, Rilke asserts that it is, rather paradoxically, an essential rite-of-passage towards an enlightened understanding of life.
“…this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside”
His words vibrate with piercing poignancy, a century later, in these pandemic-riddled times, amid a culture that demonises uncertainty as a cardinal sin; that gotcha moment media institutions are craving for. Be it the tongue-tied politician defending the latest slew of health measures or an off-the-cuff instance of miscalculated frivolity between a person of authority and the general public. Either way, there is blood in the air when uncertainty strikes.
Perhaps most compelling is Rilke’s insistence that we must recognise our subjectivity and agency even in situations or circumstances where an answer isn’t forthcoming. The unknown then is an invitation to live rather than retreat, to embrace rather than reject.
We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.
Long before modern psychologists extolled the virtues of mindful living, Rilke excavates into the depth of what it means to live with the discomfort of uncertainty. He pleads for a complete surrender to the rhythms of life and points to the futility of agonising in resistance.
The guide to living contently then is not found in the answers but rather in the questions that we have. Because only by living through these moments of haphazard indecision are we truly processing the opportunities that life presents to us. Rilke’s poetic disposition carries its way into what he terms as an extreme romanticisation of knowledge and ‘knowing’, as the ultimate arbiter of reality.
Put simply, Rilke claims that knowing is overrated. Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a hallowed final destination. Every answer is in its essence a hopeful assumption - some more convincing than others. Ultimately all explanations/answers lead to more questions and mysteries. It is a never ending epistemological quandary.
The only ‘solution’ then is to live in the question and reflect on the experience of that uncertain moment.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Letters to a Young Poet is a groundbreaking read because of how its inherent message isn’t one that is explicitly purported but rather subliminally embedded in fluidly flowing prose. It skilfully conveys the idea that true mastery in life isn’t about uncovering its answers, but ravelling in its questions.
The book has, for me at least, reiterated the deliciousness of ambiguity. That moment of ‘not knowing’ is pregnant with possibility and opportunity. Forget the outcome. Sitting on the precipice of an unresolved conundrum -whatever it may be- forces us to bravely confront what is in front of us rather than seek alternative realities of what could be or might be.
A coherent narrative or presupposed solution offers momentary solace but there is something peculiarly shortchanging about settling on an answer without experiencing the full coloured spectrum of struggles.
Like the chrysalis stage of a caterpillar, who may instinctively know from its genetic programming that it must weave itself a cocoon, it does so (presumably) without a conscious sense of why. All it has is an unexplainable natural reverence for the laws of nature. In a similar way, we may instinctively weave ourselves into a liminal cocoon of the unknown, yet at first, not even be aware that we have drawn this space around us, or know why it’s important to be here. The qualitative experience of being in that space of uncertainty is a necessary step to freeing ourselves from the manacles of old ideas and thought processes that have expired their worth.
The notion that we need to ‘figure things out’ is a positive and constructive stance to assume but the irony here is that real freedom and progress lies in how we cope whilst not knowing.
This isn’t an appeal to some twisted flavour of masochism. It is a simple celebration of the liberation that exist in the unknown. A move away from the confined ideological boxes that validate and endorse our every opinion. There needs to be a concerted attempt to ask where ‘the unknown’ sits within the taxonomy of our lives. We must make a home in the strangeness of uncertainty. Because only then can we experience the fullness of life.