I’ve been thinking about certainty and uncertainty.

Which brought Heisenberg to mind.  No, not meth monster Walter White’s pseudonym in the TV series Breaking Bad, but the real deal: German physicist Werner Heisenberg.  His name is attached to his “uncertainty principal,” which states that you can never simultaneously know the exact position and the exact speed of an object. Why not? Because everything in the universe behaves like both a particle and a wave at the same time.

Did you know that?  I didn’t, but I looked it up because, as little as I know about physics, I know a lot about our experiences of certainty and uncertainty, and about people who define themselves by one or the other of these two character traits.  I’ve learned that where you come down on this issue, whether you’re fundamentally certain or uncertain, leads to very different consequences.

Like most of us, I grew up with basic certainties:  I believed I was loved unconditionally, that life is fair, that hard work is rewarded, that the good prosper and the evil suffer, that America is exceptional; and all of this happens because it is the will of the God who is in charge of everything.  But bit-by-bit, this fabric of certainty frayed. 

My parents turned out to be something other than perfect, and their love, like all human love, something other than unconditional. Bit-by-bit.  Then, when I was in high school, a ten-year-old boy in a club I supervised died of a sudden illness; when I was asked by his mother to say something at his funeral, I couldn’t find anything in my certainties that made sense of their tragedy.  Bit-by-bit. Through my teens and twenties, I watched the Civil Rights movement – dogs, fire hoses, little girls killed in a church bombing – and the Vietnam War and Watergate.  Bit-by-bit.

Yes, there were the “wonderful surprises:” marriage, children, work I loved, friends who loved me, social progress on human rights and international progress on peace and justice.  But rocking between the fraying fabric and the wonderful surprises only left me, well, more uncertain.  Would this be a day full of wonder or despair, celebration or grief?  I never knew.  I still don’t.

“So each day I wake up to Werner Heisenberg’s world, inhale whatever is in the morning air, put my left foot in front of my right foot, and make up another day as I wend my way into whatever it holds.”

Given this erratic history, I now wake each morning to a world I believe is inherently uncertain.  Today, or this month, or the next few years are not rolling out according to some divine or human plan, some scientific necessity, or an arc of history that bends one way or another.  The intersections of natural processes and human processes constantly contrive to create what we could not have predicted.  So I wake to an uncertain world.

And I know more and more that I don’t trust people, whether liberal or conservative, who reek of certainty.  They are sure that they’re correct, whether the conflict is between a couple; a public discussion about wealth and poverty, race and ethnicity, gay and straight; the seemingly intractable religious conflicts between Shiite and Sunni, Protestant and Catholic, Christian and Muslim and Jew.  Personal or political or religious fundamentalists seldom say, “I don’t know,” or “I never thought of that,” or “Oh, so that’s what you’ve been trying to tell me.”  They exhibit no interest in understanding or being influenced by the other side. They are dug in, certain of the truth of whatever are their convictions. And I don’t trust them.

Which leaves me where?  First, all of this makes me rigorous about not drifting into my own habits of certainty.  Whether the conflict I slip into is between me and my wife, me and my colleagues and friends, or me and those whose political and religious convictions vary from mine, I try – and it’s a constant effort – to remain open minded, and open to them.  I read their gurus.  I ask them time and again to explain to me where they’re coming from, so I’m sure I get a clear understanding of where we differ.  And even when I think their position is stupid or morally corrupt – and I tell them this – I still try hard to remain respectful of them as human beings.  I don’t want to be rigid or self-righteous, two of the qualities I most abhor in people who are certain.

Second, I live as if I’m making it up as I go along, because I think we all are.  I know I’m not the same person at seventy-four (my birthday is two days from when I’m writing this) that I was at thirty-four or fifty-four or, in some ways, seventy-three.  So I do a lot of self-reflecting, trying to stay up-to-date with myself.  I will no longer cling to any conviction that is not validated by my experience.  And since I keep adding new experiences, my convictions are pliable, something I used to think of as a moral weakness but now appreciate as moral maturity.

I’ve given up much of the view I had of myself as a young man; I was more deeply wounded as a child than I realized, less emotionally sound than I assumed, more politically and socially and culturally naïve than I imagined.  I know now that for all my relational gifts I can be, and too often am, a load.  I talk too much, take up more than my share of air in the room, and spout firm opinions on things I know very little about.  Also, I’ve given up most of what seemed true to me about God; experience has just slammed my unquestioning confidence in God’s goodness, God’s fairness; my once-simple faith is in tatters.

So each day I wake up to Werner Heisenberg’s world, inhale whatever is in the morning air, put my left foot in front of my right foot, and make up another day as I wend my way into whatever it holds.

That’s what I think.  What do you think?