The more time passes, the less things are certain.
The statement above is another one of the relatively long series of sentences that stuck with me ever since I heard/read of it. The sentence itself is a bit of a mind stopper for me, and I engage in a hypothetical scenario of how many possible interpretations can be derived from it.
In a simple sense, I think it kind of goes back to this practical reality of complexity I wrote about yesterday. Time does reinforce the natural drift toward disorder and as a container, more time, usually equates more potential activities happening, which also contributes to creating a certain kind of messiness that brings about uncertainty.
However, as much as things can be uncertain, outcomes can't really be manufactured out of thin air. I have enough consolation in that no matter how things are uncertain, whatever outcomes that come from uncertain conditions will still be constrained by what's actually possible.
Recently, I've burned more awareness on witnessing my mind getting buried with thoughts about the not so distant future against the backdrop of all the information it has consumed about the future both directly and indirectly.
I'd say there's a weird fascination with future projections based on incomplete information. For example and in a general context, people will always try to pattern-match the present to the past, as if history repeats itself cleanly. The reality being more that it rhymes messily.
I'm personally trying to get unstuck from starting by default with a binary way of measuring potential outcomes. Usually, outcomes are on a surface level categorized either good or bad by subjective participants before getting into the nuance of it.
The binary lens is seductive because it lets us make quick decisions and move on. But it also flattens everything into extremes, and I think most of life exists in the gradients between.
In this case, an example close to home is a bear market is bad or good, by default as opposed to starting from the premise that here's a market condition that's neither good or bad or rather both good and bad, depending on where you sit and what you're optimizing for.
I want both flavours to co-exist within the same frame, without one canceling out the other. Because it can be very liberating to hold contradictions without needing to resolve them immediately.
The discomfort comes from wanting certainty about which version of events will matter more to me personally. Will I look back and see this period as a setback or setup?
I don't know. The answer probably depends on decisions I haven't made yet, which means I'm living in a zone where multiple futures are still live possibilities.
I notice I'm less interested these days in being right about what happens next, and more interested in being adaptable when it does. The former is a bet on my ability to predict a chaotic system, which I've learned I'm never good at. And the latter is banking on my internal self to stay responsive within it. In practice, that's not hard to achieve compared to the former. It's in a realm that's more within my control.
Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.
