Karen Restivo
In Other Words....
We’re living in a world where knowledge is power.
The more information we can ascertain, the more capable we are in being in control of our lives.
Our society is driven by the need to know in this current age of information; however, beware of information overload.
In our search for answers, fear and anxiety creep in because of the endless line of questioning we’re inundated with daily.
Author Nancy Colier writes in her Psychology Today article “How to Relax When You Don’t have all the Answers,” suggests finding peace in uncertainty is the secret to reducing your stress and anxiety.
She writes, “To reason is to think, to use the rational mind, understand, and make sense of our world.
“Over time, we’ve put more and more eggs in the reasoning basket, betting on thinking to save the day. The thinking mind is the road to salvation.
“At this moment in history, we’ve lost interest and, to some degree, respect, for all the other ways of knowing: bodily, intuitively, experientially, and so forth - all the ways we can know other than through thinking and logic.”
People of all ages struggle to turn their thinking minds off in exchange for some peace and relaxation at home.
Concerns mount up with children’s school and extracurricular activities, project deadlines at work, and staying within the household budget each month.
And just when you climb into bed, a whole host of questions come to mind challenging you to move your ‘hours of operation’ into the wee hours of the morning.
Sound familiar?
It’s time for a shift in perception and getting comfortable with not knowing.
Colier notes, “…Life is forever depositing us in situations where we cannot know and don’t have access to the answers we want, don’t know the way forward, to say nothing of the larger not knowing - what we’re all doing here, existing, in the first place.
“We would be wise to learn how to inhabit it and, even better, to do so with a sense of acceptance and relaxation rather than judgment
and fear.”
Colier suggests learning to live in the “question.”
Embracing uncertainty allows us to return to the present moment, pause and open ourselves to deeper and wiser solutions.
Colier says, “Relaxing into the questions, unexpectedly, allows us to join a larger unfolding, a process bigger than ourselves, and thankfully, one in which we don’t have to be responsible for controlling our life at every turn.”
In other words, once we can surrender the control of needing to know every detail of a given situation, we welcome safety and trust into our arsenal with the knowing that all will be well.
Karenrestivo57@gmail.com