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How to Find Peace in Uncertainty
When everything falls apart, how can we feel solid again?
In March 2020, when the rise of the coronavirus pandemic shut down my then-home city of Chicago, there were moments — just tiny flickers of time — where I smiled with knowing. Before you go on thinking I’m a sociopath, let me tell you: I was smiling because I was watching my fellow humans discover a truth I had known since my mom died suddenly in 2013: we live in a world where anything can happen.
I quickly found that many grieving people shared this sentiment. In watching their friends, neighbors, and coworkers wrestle with the anxiety and overwhelm of sudden uncertainty, they found themselves thinking, “This feels awfully familiar; in fact, this feels a lot like the first weeks and months of my grief.” As a grieving person, it’s a surreal occurrence to have wrestled with great uncertainty in the past and then to watch others wrestle with great uncertainty in the present. There’s a smidgen of sad and hard-earned pride in being the one in your friend or family circle to have “gone first” through living with uncertainty—an experience nobody ever wants to have in the first place.
