The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. (“Whatever inspiration is,” one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”)
In a culture that bandaids its fissures with self-righteousness, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to remain undecided, to refuse to mistake for finished the works in progress we are, to remember that our task here is not to be certain but to be true — to our incompleteness, to the open-endedness of life itself, to the unhurried wisdom of the heart.
That is what Jeff Foster celebrates in one of the poems in his altogether wonderful collection of reckonings The Way of Rest: Finding the Courage to Hold Everything in Love (public library) — a prayerful invitation to “find a space in your heart for the unwanted, the unloved, the rejected aspects of experience” and to honor the sanctity of your doubts.
INDECISION
by Jeff FosterFriend, please,
do not try to decide now.
Do not shut any possibility out of your heart. Honor this place of not knowing.Bow before this bubbling mess of creativity.
Slow down. Breathe.
Sink into wonderment.
Befriend the very place where you stand.
Any decision will make itself, in time.
ny choice will happen when your defenses are down.
Answers will appear only when they are ready.
When the questions have been fully honored and loved.Do not label this place “indecision.”
It is more alive than that.
It is a place where possibilities grow.
It is a place where uncertainty is sacred.
There is courage in staying close.
There is strength in not knowing.
There is power in doubt.Friend, please know,
there is simply no choice now.
Except to breathe, and breathe again,
and trust this Intelligence beyond mind.A decision will grow, but for today, nourish the ground.
In the introduction to The Way of Rest, Foster observes: “Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it’s not death we’re afraid of but too much life.” And perhaps this is why we are so eager to foreclose our conclusions — deciding is a way of containing what will otherwise spill into the unbearable infinity of possibility, which is in consequence a way of being less alive. But isn’t the whole point to be more alive, to stop waiting and start living in order not to waste your life?
