How to make uncertainty a hell for yourself
Uncertainty is a given in a faith transition. The difference between uncertainty feeling like freedom or feeling like hell comes down to one variable.
One of my favorite analogies a spiritual direction client has offered me was this:
“I feel like a lost little bee. I liked being a worker bee in the hive. I liked being told what to do with my life, with my days. I liked the fulfillment of feeling like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. But I can’t go back to the hive. It’s not a good place. But now it’s just me. I’m the only one in charge of what to do with my life and my days. I miss the certainty.”
This analogy hits especially hard since the Deseret beehive is the church’s chosen symbol for itself (I wrote a whole article about how the beehive perfectly represents both the best and the worst of the church here).
Everyone’s deconstruction journey is different when they leave the church, but everyone deals with the loss of certainty.
We were taught that CERTAINTY = SAFETY. So when that certainty leaves, it feels scary. Since our goal was total certainty, a lack of certainty about our path, our beliefs, our decisions feels like we’re doing something wrong.
And it’s not only high demand religion that loves certainty, our silly little monkey brains are absolutely clamoring after certainty too. The part of our evolution that is designed to keep us safe sends off red flashing alarms when we are uncertain.
However, certainty comes at a cost.
The surefire way to make uncertainty a hell for yourself
Sometimes uncertainty feels like “Wheee!!! Freeeeeeedom!” and sometimes uncertainty feels like “AAaahhhhh!!!! This is all up to ME?!?!? I’m gonna screw it all up!!! Someone just tell me what to do!!!”
The difference between these two potentialities really comes down to one variable: belief in a One True Path (OTP).
If you believe in any situation there exists one correct choice and its your job to find it, uncertainty will be a hellscape.
Remember the tree of life/iron rod analogy?
We were taught there is ONE correct path. Every single decision had the potential to bring you closer to God or further from him. Who remembers these lyrics:
“Choose the right when a choice is placed before you.”
“There’s the right and the wrong to ev’ry question;”
I mean no pressure, but within every single question and every single choice there is a right and there is a wrong.
The only saving grace here was that the rules weren’t up to us. It wasn’t up to us to machete our way through the forest and forge a path. Our ONLY job was to hold to the rod. Follow the straight and narrow path. Keep the commandments. Follow the prophet. Success ensured.
Phew!
Not my job to figure everything out. Only my job to obey.
Ok, now, imagine you are holding one of those viewfinder toys from the 80s.
Image the little image you’ve been looking at for decades is the tree of life vision with the one correct path:
And then suddenly *click.*
You pull down on the image-switchy-lever-handle-thingy and the image changes.
It now looks like this:
SO. MANY. POTENTIAL. PATHS.
And no map.
The surefire way to be miserable in this forest adventure of life is to now think “Ok, one of these paths is the OTP (One True Path) for me, I just have to figure out which one.”
*cue crippling anxiety.
Now that there is no church telling us which path is correct, it’s allllll up to us to find the correct one.
We hem. We haw. We look around at what our peers are doing. We poll the audience. We do our research. We still aren’t sure. We tentatively take a step forward, but no! What if that one isn’t right? We take a step back and reassess. We re-weigh options. We read more books. We listen to more podcasts. We consult some mushrooms thinking they might know.1
We wish someone would just hand you a map with your One True Path already.
Let’s say (hypothetically of course…..) that this is your first year with all your kids at school and it’s time to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. Thinking that there is ONE correct answer out there that will best center the personal Venn diagram of what you’re good at, what you like and what provides value to the world? The right answer exists you just have to figure it out?
That line of thinking is a one-way ticket to making your life a hell.
A Better Way: Adventuring without an OTP
In the last viewfinder image- different paths kept being highlighted in yellow as you asked: “Is this my correct path?” “This one?” “This one?”
Let’s go ahead and pull down the image-switchy-lever-handle-thingy one more time.
This time, the same image appears, but in this version no one path is being highlighted in yellow.
In this one, One True Path doesn’t exist. There is no such thing.
Every potential path is just that… a path. Nothing more. Nothing less.
There is no wrong path.
There are just experiments. Exploration. Adventure.
And endless opportunities for course correction.
Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer nails it on the head- give her a 57 second listen:
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“Just randomly choose” Ellen advises. Who to marry, what job to take, which college to go to. Just choose. Pick a path. Know course correction is available to you. Every choice is a roll of the dice no matter how much time you spend deliberating. There is no certainty.
So roll the dice.
Pick a path. Walk, skip, hike, journey along.
Don’t like it? That doesn’t mean you chose wrong! That just means you’ve gathered some useful information. How else would you know you didn’t like it unless you tried it?
There are no wrong paths. There is just experimentation. There is just discovery.
Seeking exploration rather than seeking your one true path is the key to relaxing into uncertainty.
Perhaps you miss being a worker bee. Being told your marching orders and having each decision validated as correct. Of course you do. Certainty feels so safe and nice. It’s so nice to not have everything up to us. It certainly doesn’t help that we were trained to be worker bees. Trained to not trust ourselves, to listen to voices of authority over our own inner knowing2, to feel safest when most compliant.
To my former worker bees:
May we strap on our backpacks and set off. May we use our excitement as our compass. May we U-Turn as many times as we damn well feel like. May we release the allure of finding the OTP and treat each decision as an experiment. May we fly. Journey on little bees.
If you would like to gather with other little former worker bees like yourself boy do I have good news for you! We’re creating our own little hive in the Reconstruction Community and our theme this month is “embracing uncertainty.”
Join for just this session for $70 here, or become a member of the Reconstruction Community by purchasing an annual subscription by clicking this button:
and maybe they do.
Important footnote on inner knowing: I do try to always point people back to their own inner knowing, but things can get hairy if we treat our inner knowing the same way we used to treat prophets- as holding the absolute certain OTP. Then we run into the same old certainty traps (rigidity, close-mindedness, looking for a silver bullet, lots of anxiety of choosing wrong). I always recommend looking to your own inner knowing to figure out what it is you want and then to value your own desires. Less because they are your certain OTP, more because we are so accustomed to looking outside of us instead of inside for what we should do, and it’s such a good practice to look to ourselves before we look to our peers, partners, parents, societal expectations, etc. Does that make sense? Inner knowing= so helpful! Certainty, rigidity, anxiety= less helpful.
Thank you! This is so helpful! And the Tree of Life imagery was indeed a jump scare 😬. It was validating for you to acknowledge that it would be in the image caption!
I can't believe there aren't more likes, this is sooo good and sooo needed!
By the way, what you describe comes close to existential anxiety: the realization that I'm totally free to choose, not my conditions, but my path forward, that I'm responsible for my choices, and the angst that comes from that realization. Then the theory is to use this anxiety as a tool to move and engage with / in life. In practice it can be hard to do ;)
And listening a little bit to the "Ok just be careful where you step in" part of the anxiety can actually be quite good ;)
"Follow your heart but take your brain"