Finding Hope in Times of Uncertainty

Back in the 1970's, a Belgian chemist named Ilya Prigogine was awarded a Nobel Prize for a theory that said it’s “the capacity for being shaken up” that ironically is the key to growth.

The theory, called “dissipative structures”—as in things dissipating—is a fancy way of saying that friction is a fundamental property of nature and nothing grows without it. Not mountains, not pearls, not people.

According to Prigogine, any system—whether it’s at the molecular level, the chemical, physical, social, or psychological—that’s protected from turbulence is protected from change and becomes stagnant. And by extension, anything that’s true to life and the imperatives of growth isn’t going to be unshakable.

So by all rights we ought to be halfway to enlightenment by now, given the Nobel-prize-winning levels of friction and turbulence in the world these days—and the uncertainty that comes along with it.

For example, the pandemic—is it over or not? The economy—will there be a recession or not?Politics—will democracy prevail moving forward, or not? The climate—are we going to turn this ship around in time? The job market—it went from something resembling The Hunger Games during the pandemic to something of a boom lately. And all this doesn't even include whatever personal and professional challenges you may have on your plate.

And what all this friction and turbulence tend to evoke in us (or rather provoke) is uncertainty and anxiety, which are probably indistinguishable for most people. Uncertainty is anxiety.

But friction and turbulence can also help us grow our sense of hope.

A Timeline of Growth Spurts

If you sat down and made a timeline of the growth spurts in your life, you'd likely see a distinct pattern emerge—of setbacks consistently setting you up for breakthroughs, “failures” leading you toward opportunities, challenges leading you toward growth, feeling lost eventually reorienting you toward “finding yourself.”

And most growth spurts would probably have been preceded by upheaval of one kind or another, and certainly accompanied by it.

If you experienced any kind of silver lining to the pandemic—an unexpected benefit, blessing, insight, or affirmative course-correction—then you've had a recent encounter with this pattern.

Same thing if you've had a vaccine lately, because the entire science of immunology is based on introducing a little chaos into the system in order to strengthen it, shaking it up for the sake of helping it evolve.

All of which is to say that if you stick with any given crisis or challenge long enough—that is, ride it out in full consciousness, with all instruments and receivers turned to the "on" position, and the intention to stay in conversation with your life—it will inevitably lead you toward growth. A crisis will often evolve or resolve into what the mythologist Joseph Campbell called a “directive crisis,” what Gail Sheehy in her book Passages calls “falling up,” and what the rest of us just call turning lemons into lemonade.

And this understanding of how growth spurts happen can be a source of hope if not trust during tumultuous times.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,” says Wendell Berry, “we have come to our real work. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

This can also clarify something that former president of Czechia (then Czech Republic) President and poet Vaclav Havel once said: “Hope is not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

It makes sense that decay and growth go together, are in fact two sides of a coin. It makes sense that life is cyclical, and what goes down must come up. It makes sense that in the central creation story in the Western canon—ie Genesis—Chaos with a capital C is described as the condition of the Earth before it was formed. Meaning that Chaos precedes Creation, and if you deny yourself the one, you're going to deny yourself the other. And there's hope in that equation.

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Chaos, it turns out, doesn't mean disorder. It means unshaped life—another way of saying potential. The original Greek definition of the word chaos was “to be wide open.” So this encourages us to bring to the chaos and turbulence in our life, and in the world, a sense of openness, curiosity, even welcoming.

M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, suggests another way that uncertainty and hope share a coin. During the Q&A period at the end of a lecture he gave in San Francisco years ago, I stood up and asked how, in struggling with an important personal decision, I would know I was doing the right thing.

“There's no such formula,” he said. “The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind—the one that knows things—so it’s impossible to know for sure. But if you’re willing to sit with ambiguity, to accept uncertainties and contradictory meanings, then your unconscious will always be a step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. You’ll therefore do the right thing, though you won’t know it at the time.”

If Peck is right that the subconscious is one step ahead of the conscious mind—if not possessed of deeper knowing—then anything that helps you strike up an ongoing conversation with the subconscious will help you make right decisions, and give you hope that you’re on the right track.

These conversations with the subconscious might take any number of forms: the interpretation of dreams (which Freud called “the royal road to the unconscious”), artwork done in the service of self-discovery (such as free-association writing in which you let the unconscious go on a roll with a pen in its hand), shadow-work (investigating the parts of you you tend to avoid), or dialoguing with body symptoms.

We also need to not just hope for the best during uncertain times, but to find hope. That is, deliberately seek out ways to inspire and re-inspire ourselves, and counteract the downward-pulling forces of fear, worry, confusion and despair—all of which tend to drain our initiative, along with our hope. As Joan Baez used to say, “Action is the antidote to despair.”

Finding hope may mean spending time with inspiring people, or uplifting books, or community projects, or time in nature, contemplating the bigger picture. It might be a continual focusing on what you can achieve rather than what’s out of your control, on what is working in your life and in the world, or on your own resilience, your power to choose how you're going to respond to whatever life throws at you.

Or it might mean just sitting respectfully with things as they are, and letting yourself feel what you feel, without even needing to understand it, no less do something about it. Sometimes the better part of wisdom isn’t in the philosophy of improvement, but acceptance.

Finding hope is the ongoing work of finding reasons to keep your chin up, which of course will be sorely tested by the world in its present shocking condition, or by what might be demanded of you in making good on your own hopes and dreams. And the bigger those are—certainly hopes for social or political change—the more even your most concerted efforts can feel like the proverbial drop in the bucket. But that's how buckets get filled—drop by drop.

And if all your efforts toward steadying the world's rocking boats during these turbulent times, all your hoping and helping and trying to do the right thing, feels like throwing a stone into a lake, remember this: science tells us that because that stone is now lying on the bottom, the level of the water had to have risen. Archimedes taught us that sitting in his bathtub.

The rub is that you can’t ever measure it. The lake’s too big. You have to take it entirely on faith that it matters that you’re here and doing your good works, and that the level of the water will necessarily rise.