The desire to know is also a desire to find certainty.
It will often seem quite simple. It’s, for example, to know what to write in an offer to be certain that it will be accepted. It’s, for example, to ask the right question at the right moment, so that the result corresponds with what we want.
It seems easy, because we believe that we know what we want.
However, we don’t know what our experience will be when we receive what we want.
In a strange turn of events, I found myself in an unexpected conversation with someone hosting me. I hadn’t met him before, but he had a quite direct and open approach. Already when he called me to give me some instructions, he had shared that he is at the end of his life. When I arrived, I quickly learned that he is of the age my mother would have been now, and that he has cancer.
As our conversation progressed, he also shared that during his last conversation with his doctor, he had been asked if he wanted to know what the doctor knew about his sickness. My host decided that he didn’t know the answer to this question and had told the doctor that he would come back to him with an answer.
My host instinctively understood that knowing the answer to this question wouldn’t give him what he might want. And even more so, that receiving the information the doctor had might impact on his ability to remain hopeful or open to life, and that it might provide him with information he wasn’t ready to handle.
He is in a situation where being uncertain might be the better option.
However, here too, my host wasn’t sure how he would be able to continue to live with this uncertainty. One that could suddenly seem dreadful to him.
We may want to get rid of uncertainty, but we may not trust our ability to live with a certainty that reveals itself then.
My host’s situation makes it easy to understand how difficult such a dilemma between certainty and uncertainty might be. But the same dilemma may happen for us in everyday situations. It is up to us to learn to live with such a dilemma, i.e., to learn how we respond to it.
