Living joyfully with uncertainty

Uncertainty is a fact of life. How do I be certain of anything? To be alive is to be alive in uncertainty. You do not even know whether you would be alive the next moment. And if you would be alive the next moment, you do not know what would come your way.

So there is uncertainty.

The question is — For whom? For whom?

For the body there is a lot of uncertainty. It might just rain, and then your hair gets wet. “Ah! Uncertain weather. The hair couldn’t remain dry.” You do not know what kind of pathogens have already made their way to your insides and what kind of mischief they are creating there. The next medical report might declare that you have a terminal illness.

Do ‘you’ have to live in uncertainty?

Uncertainty refers to the whimsical patterns of Prakriti (nature), uncertainty refers to the unpredictable waves of time. You do not know what they would bring with themselves.

The world creates you and destroys you. Every moment, moment after moment — the body is being destroyed, the body is being created; the mind is being destroyed, the mind is being created. This is what is called as ‘rebirth’, ‘reincarnation’.

You do not know what the next shock from the world would be, you do not know what the next news would be, you do not know what the next wave would bring.

If you do not like this helpless state, then you will have to live as someone who is very surely unaffected.

It is possible, because the tendency to feel affected is a choice.

It is a deliberate choice.

If it is a choice to feel affected by the world, surely the choice can be reversed.

Surely one can also choose to not remain affected by the world.

The Upanishads put it so beautifully.

They say, “If you consider yourself to be in bondage, then you are in bondage. If you consider yourself free, you are free.”

It all depends on your deep-deep assessment of yourself.

It all depends on what you call yourself — your identity…