Our brain want to keep us safe and so we often approach life counting on a certain order of things, thinking that predictability and control will keep us safe. Then we encounter the experience of uncertainty, often with chaos close hard on its heels. This ambiguity and randomness can sometimes be disconcerting, as we struggle to understand and make sense of what is happening.
We try to deal with things dealing rationally, sometimes emotionally. Neuroscientist David Eagleman captures the duality: “There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in [our] brain, each competing to control the single output channel of [our] behaviour. The rational system is one that cares about the analysis of things in the outside world, while the emotional system monitors the internal state….”
Because we don’t see a ready way to relate powerfully with these dual realities, we attempt to apply patterns of order and the more we do that, the less effective we become. Predictability and control in a world where you are moving to the next level. There is no certainty as an inevitability or predictability of an outcome. We are the ones saying something and looking for a breakthrough to make it happen. Real power occurs when we know we have something to say about the way things are. Recognising that shifts the horizon of what’s possible, and it’s from there the full range available in being human can be explored and lived.