The Secret Power of Ambivalence

The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. (“Whatever inspiration is,” one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”) In a culture that bandaids its fissures with self-righteousness, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to remain undecided, to refuse to mistake for finished the works in progress we are, to remember that our task here is not to be certain but to be true — to our incompleteness, to the open-endedness of life itself, to the unhurried wisdom of the heart.

That is what Jeff Foster celebrates in one of the poems in his altogether wonderful collection of reckonings The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love (public library) — a prayerful invitation to “find a space in your heart for the unwanted, the unloved, the rejected aspects of experience” and to honor the sanctity of your doubts. Friend, please, do not try to decide now. Do not shut any possibility out of your heart.

Honor this place of not knowing. Bow before this bubbling mess of creativity. Befriend the very place where you stand.

Any decision will make itself, in time. ny choice will happen when your defenses are down. Answers will appear only when they are ready. When the questions have been fully honored and loved.

Do not label this place “indecision.” It is more alive than that. It is a place where possibilities grow. It is a place where uncertainty is sacred.

There is courage in staying close. There is strength in not knowing. Friend, please know, there is simply no choice now.