The Beauty of Uncertainty

Where do you see yourself in five years? What do you want to do with your major? Any internships yet? How’s the dating world treating you?

These questions seem harmless, but when you hear them all the time, they can almost become harmful. 

In today’s society, people like to have answers. They like to have schedules that map out each second of their day and their future job picked out at 18. They like to know exactly what others think of them, and how things will play out. Our society hates words such as “pending” or “awaiting arrival.” We are impatient.  With all the answers at our fingertips, we can find out anything at any time, and with valid sources to back them up. But when it comes to interpersonal issues, we might not get all the answers right away and that can become bothersome. 

I want you, dear reader, to recognize moments in your own world where you are impatient, where you act without taking time or you find yourself getting anxious over not knowing specifics.  I hope that you use this article as a way to calm your mind and as a way to know that you aren’t alone in feeling pressure. You don’t have to have everything figured out. There is beauty in not knowing.

The pressure to have a plan.

College is a very confusing place to be uncertain. We are told that it’s a time for us to find out what we want to do with our lives. It’s a time of self discovery and newfound independence. Yet on the other hand, we are constantly getting asked by so many people around us about what we want to do with our lives. Some people may have their response already on the tip of their tongue, but for some of us, we may not really know yet and that’s okay. 

We can fall down the rabbit hole of thinking in black and white. Either I know exactly what I want to do or I’m missing a few parts so I’m a complete failure. Either I am extremely rich or I’m not rich so I must be dead broke. It’s an all or nothing mentality. 

Once you look at it from a different angle, you realize that there is space in between those extremes, a gray area.

The gray, or uncertainty, can look like having enough money where you can pay for rent but you aren’t going to go out to purchase a mansion, or it’s having internships set up in a field of your interest without knowing what job you want to have with that.

The gray gets us to where we are going, it’s a stepping stone.

The pressure to understand.

It isn’t just our future that we can feel pressure about, it’s our present too.

Have you ever caught yourself overthinking a conversation with someone? Or found yourself wondering when someone will text you back and what the next date might possibly be? That is a prime example of uncomfortability in the gray.

In these circumstances, the gray is not knowing exactly how someone feels. It’s not knowing how to move forward or contemplating communication. We as humans want to have a sense of control in our lives, that’s why moments in interpersonal connections where we have questions can really bother us. Unfortunately, we will never truly know what someone else is thinking. We can find ourselves overthinking that since they didn’t text us back, they aren’t into us, they are acting differently than they usually do so they want nothing to do with me anymore.

Take the pressure off of you, take the blame of something that isn’t even guaranteed off of your shoulders. Maybe they are simply busy at work, or they had a bad day that had absolutely nothing to do with you. Overthinking and questioning can start to become selfish, so before that happens try to put scenarios into perspective. 

Moving forward without knowing where to go next.

Sometimes we think that not-knowing inhibits us from acting on things, but in reality, it creates opportunities for us to do more.

Take the example of not getting a text back. You have options to choose from in this scenario, you have an opportunity to move forward. You can text the person again, or do something to keep yourself busy! When it comes to not knowing what future job you want, you can still take an internship in your field of study to see what you like and don’t like about potential jobs.  

We can tend to think that once we make a decision, we have to stick with it. That’s why so many college kids feel the pressure when they switch their major. It’s okay to be indecisive, it’s okay to switch things up. What isn’t okay though is to stop going forward. 

Say you don’t even know what major you want. Still, go to college, take classes, ask questions, and through those actions you might be able to start defining your future and what you want to do! 

You can control whether you allow uncertainty to consume you or whether you allow yourself to exist within it.

Where growth really happens.

Growth happens in the gray. It happens when you don’t know where to turn next. Growth in the gray happens when you decide to keep moving forward in the midst of uncertainty. It’s when you accept that sometimes you can’t make decisions right now. It’s accepting the fact that you can’t control everything, that you don’t know exactly what people are thinking, and that you can’t control the future, you can only control yourself in the here and now. 

Maybe growing up isn’t about having all the answers. Maybe it’s about becoming comfortable with the questions. 

The next time you find yourself worrying about your future, overthinking someone’s actions, or feeling behind because you don’t know what comes next, take a deep breath and remind yourself that you are not less than them for not knowing. You are not behind. You are not failing. You are simply in the gray and there is beauty in that.

• college
• mental health