Splash No. 188 - Guessing

Guessing

Before I flew home for Thanksgiving, I got a haircut and my barber told me that I’d been parting my hair in the wrong direction. I have no long I’d spent in ignorance, pushing my hairs away from their natural flow. And even after I learned this, I didn’t start parting my hair in the right direction until last week, when I randomly remembered. I wonder why the thought suddenly came to me — perhaps there was a follicular intervention, where the nerves in my scalp sat down my prefrontal cortex to set things straight. Or maybe it was something in the stars, as multiple planets are in retrograde or something. Millions of dominos must fall to cause any given situation or thought or moment. We can only see a few of these pieces at any given time — our senses are limited, our memories and attention even more so. At the end of the day, it’s all just guesswork!

Even “hindsight is 20/20” seems like an exaggeration, especially when we think about how poorly we remember most things. Do we really have the ability to see the past as clearly as we see the present? Aren’t we still guessing about what caused what, like we try to guess what the future is, based on our limited amount of information? I’m no optometrist, but I’d say that hindsight is at most 40/20 vision, and our vision for the future is even worse. How could we expect to predict the future when we can’t even look at our pasts clearly? All we truly can look clearly at is the present, but even then we never know where exactly our focus should fall. 

I feel like I’m at a transition period in my life, so I’ve been spending my time looking both forwards and backwards. In the past, I’ve looked to knowledge and information as ways to comfort myself in times of uncertainty; yet, the more I look both ways, the more that I realize that this information can only help me so much. Over the last two years, I’ve read countless articles of experts and non-experts prognosticating on the pandemic, trying to make sense of how things have been handled, imagining every single scenario and beyond. And at this point, I simply have to accept the fact that no one will ever have enough information to make the future feel comfortable or even the past feel comfortable. We can try to make our guesses smarter and more informed, but we’ll never have the answers.

I’m once again reminding myself that uncertainty is not a problem to be solved. It’s the inevitable background song of life, one that we can never get used to, but can maybe learn to appreciate.

Drops of the Week
 

• PLAYLIST - healing+cleansing frequencies - this isn't really music but listening to random frequencies actually feels pretty good sometimes.

• ARTICLE - "Lessons from Louise Glück" by Sam Huber - interview with a living legend!

• POEM - "Afternoons and Early Evenings" by Louise Glück - "I would like to sleep like that again, to have in my mind / not one thought"

With each day, we can move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
 

Donate to victims of the Bronx fire Mutual Aid Networks

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Maybe,
Nikhil