To learn anything in life is going to demand a lot of patience – haven’t we heard some version of this statement before? It’s quite easy to put it like that though, isn’t it? But what does patience even mean? Because by itself, patience is just a word like every other word.

Going deeper, it seems like Patience is someone who doesn’t like to travel alone. He always brings his friend uncertainty along. I mean, we’ve all been there. 

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, physicist Carlo Rovelli writes:

I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking—thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change.

Essentially, Rovelli says not to just ignore the certainty but rather he says we must embrace it and invite uncertainty. That’s steep but what other choice do we have? Because if there was any other way to go about creative living, I am sure we would have figured it out by now. But here we are looking for means to deal with the uncertainty.

Lisa Marchiano, a therapist and writer based in Philadelphia, suggests making uncertainty your mission.

“To tolerate uncertainty, rather than having to make it go away. That creates a different frame for thinking about things: all you have to do is tolerate it. Of course, that may be very difficult – but it can get us out of this place where we’re spinning our wheels, trying to fix something it isn’t within our power to fix.”

“A crisis can heighten the opportunity to find meaning, to get clear about what matters most”

 If we want to remain a student for life, we have got to embrace uncertainty which comes for the ride along with patience. Why Patience? Because that’s the only way to be a learner with regards to anything. And we should be easy on ourselves through this lifelong process – because it is going to take longer than we think.

From what I gather about other successful artists, it is clear that one commonality amongst all of them is having a practice to remedy this. I like that word a lot because in its essence, it is about action. I like the fact that doctors use that word to denote their private work setup. Why should our job be any different? So approach it like a job that has quantifiable traits. Like something one can measure- a page a day, a sketch a day, etc . This is another area where we creatives struggle with. 

We have got to adopt what Oliver Burkeman calls radical incrementalism in his book, Four Thousand Weeks. The idea that you grow in small increments – be it in one’s craft or general life. He adds:

Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again — as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: that your partner won’t leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won’t claim the lives of anyone you love, that your favoured candidate will win the next election, that you can get through your to-do list by the end of Friday afternoon. But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win.

It’s funny how the words, worry and uncertainty, are interchangeable here. 

So let us leave certainty behind because it is an unwinnable battle. Instead, let us invite the uncertainty that comes with any learning, with any process. 

Tolerate it until it teaches you of its indispensability for growth, both creatively and personally. 

Peace and grace,
Nikhil.