Mike Slavin 4 min read

Taking Flight: The Hidden Gift of Uncertainty

Philosophy change life

Taking Flight: The Hidden Gift of Uncertainty

Your entrance into this world was a swan-dive into an ocean of sensation. A nest of parental energy insulates you from the dangers of the outside world because you’re only a little point of sensitivity without the navigation and communication skills to survive on your own.

This nest gives you room to gather enough information to eventually be able to stand on your own two feet, both physically and socially.

As our cognition comes online we begin to sense-make around this sensation. We forge a model of ourselves and a model of the world and we begin to operate within these parameters, adjusting them over time based on the feedback of our environment.

Naturally, these models are flawed as we’ve only been exposed to a very limited information set. Our model of the world can only be informed by what we’ve experienced (that includes our indirect experiences of other people’s experiences).

These flaws produced by the condition of limited information, although perfectly natural, make our models vulnerable to disruption.

A sudden trauma or loss collapses the illusions baked into the model, jolting us into an awareness that reality exists beyond our assessments of it.

Our illusion of the world we had been holding solid, melts into confusion and pain.

These moments reveal a truth that is terrifying to most humans: that life is a free fall. We don’t know where this is headed and our existence is engulfed in uncertainty.

Reading that is enough for most people to turn away. I implore you, stay with me.

Recognize that as we dove into life from the womb, we never stopped diving. In fact, being born is like being dropped into a bottomless valley, continuously falling with no end in sight.

This truth of uncertainty is often concealed in the parental nest so that there is time for these models to form and upgrade before they are battle-tested against the harsh realities of life.

These harsh realities come into our experience sooner or later. Once exposed to this condition of uncertainty, most people thrash around, clawing for anything they could find to stabilize them.

But as we fall, the trees and cliffs are all too far out to grab a hold of.

We’ll thrash and thrash until the world matches our model again OR until we upgrade our model.

Most people wait until the world matches their model which only subjects their model to future disruption because the information the experience was offering was not received.

In our attempts to edit uncertainty out of experience, our models will fixate on those around us in order to stabilize ourselves.

We use our relationships, particularly familial, romantic and professional, to make solid an otherwise fluid reality.

Because we’re relying on each other to make uncertainty invisible, many relationships become the progressive compromise of each individual’s freedom in the name of security. This continues until both sides have sold their connection for a prison cell where they confuse their cell mate for the judge who sentenced them.

hidden gift uncertainty highexistence

Eventually, these relationships collapse, re-opening the portal to uncertainty that you attempted to seal out with the relationship. The thrashing returns.

Many people will seek to fill that portal by running back to the same connection they were imprisoned in. This can happen a few times before the feeling of uncertainty becomes less painful than the relationship.

And once that relationship has run its course and can no longer conceal uncertainty, a new relationship will be used to fill that portal. A similar process of progressive compromise of freedoms will run until the same thing happens or both parties decide that the prison cell is better than the free fall, settling for a cellmate instead of a soul mate.

By referencing our sense of security in things outside of ourselves, we corner ourselves into disempowerment. Our only recourse to regain a sense of influence over our experience is to attempt to control the behavior of the person we perceive to be operating outside our parameters of security.

We’re constantly scanning the behavior of others below the surface of our consciousness asking “are you sure you love me?” and “will you leave me?” and that scanning is the energy that ultimately pushes them away.

Because the model didn’t get upgraded to deal with uncertainty, the world will drench you in doubt until you become willing to upgrade the model.

What happens when you upgrade your model to include uncertainty?

A genuine awakening experience.

You’ll cross a threshold where you realize, although you’re falling, you’re JUST falling. And that threat of uncertainty, that formerly untouchable aspect of your consciousness, becomes the doorway into the world. Because you’re no longer preoccupied with making considerations for your own safety, the beauty of the valley is revealed to you.

You claim your freedom.

And all the things you were afraid to LOSE, you now get to truly HAVE.

With fresh eyes, you see the majesty of your predicament, the unrelenting novelty of your experience, the wonder of your existence.

This experience can feel similar to childhood while the parental nest had incubated you against uncertainty. The world becomes made up of magic again.

As you start to acclimate to the mesmerizing relationship you’re forming with reality, a 90-degree rotation of perspective is sparked.

Because as you cease to thrash, you gain the ability to move WITH the “air currents” opening up a new dimension of navigation previously unavailable.

In cooperation with uncertainty, you see that there is no difference between falling with no end and FLYING with no destination.

When this shift occurs, you’ll engage with uncertainty not as an unfortunate truth but as a requirement for you to exist as a CREATOR.

For what you’ve forgotten is that when you dove into this life you brought the bliss of the womb with you. You’ve been searching for this bliss in all of the places that couldn’t give it to you because you cleverly hid it where no one could touch it: inside yourself.

This bliss takes rediscovering.

And as you activate that bliss you become a point of certainty brilliantly painting the canvas of uncertainty.

You become the creator you came here to be.

Mike Slavin

Mike Slavin

Mike is a magician and poet telling tales from the intersection of attention, deception, and wonder.

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