P-A-N-I-C
One day last week while performing my routine evening walk, I strolled past something in the moment most peculiar and odd. In a little park in front of a church sat a party of four people. By my estimation the eldest was an about 60-year-old white woman, next to her sat a 30-year-old black man, and on the opposite side sat a 20-year-old Middle Eastern man and next to him a local Finnish teenage boy. They sat drinking. They played cards. They shared laughter and a smile or two. Guess what I thought of all this?
My first instinct was: what the fuck is going on. With a proper thought I concluded: the fuck is going on. At this point I could not have been more ashamed and disappointed in myself. And I thought to myself what a shameful world we live in. How could I think to myself like this? Obviously, I did not express my, at this point in no way sure conscious or unconscious thoughts out loud, and especially not in front of the party of four. Unfortunately, I could not stay away from the habit of staring. I truly believe my face was during this moment the most readable face a man can possess. I believe my face screamed: what the fuck is going on. What the fuck are you people, and what the fuck are you people doing.
At these moments you can't help but have to search for divine help in God or the more socially convenient way in religion. I instantly remembered a phrase I read the previous day in Frédéric Gros book Marcher, une philosophie about the Orthodox Christian tradition of repeating phrases endlessly, in particularly along the lines of: I have sinned, Jesus Christ, Oh Holy Gods son, please forgive me. And there it hit me: What if it never was my fault. What if my stupid and ignorant behavior was destined to me long before my birth, in the hands of G0d.
This could not have been any further from my beliefs and philosophy. I have doubts over God, and I am a truly hardcore theist. I admire the thoughts of an existentialist man and I do believe that with our free will and choice we have no predetermined destiny from birth, rather we have to shape one in life, in a sense, find the meaning behind it all for just ourselves. But yet, in the moment of madness, I could not help but wonder, and perhaps even doubt everything I had believed hitherto, and from this day forward I was not sure if could be sure of even the sureness of sure in the future. The ultimate doubt had struck me. By this I do not mean I became a paranoid schizophrenic in a moment of both madness and brilliance, rather I became yet again uncertain of certain nature of things and I lost a sense of adamance, that is, a certain stubbornness in the righteousness of my precarious, but even my most stable words and thoughts.
And philosophically uncertainty is in no way intrinsically dangerous, quite opposite it is what enforces philosophers to think and work, because in a world and mind of complete certainty all causes and events of life would have lost their meaning. We would not have the universal incentive to do things, that is, our uncertainty of what happens next. Our intrigue and curiosity have its building bricks layered on the certainty of uncertainty. But then again the danger that deforms from uncertainty is Fear. What if we will never know everything. What if we never get to experience love. What if we may never love again. What if we may never taste success. What if we were never truly happy. And what if, what if we may never touch the sky, nor reach the meaning of life. Will all hope be lost? Will we fall back to the ages of fearing everything? To accepting that everything must be intrinsically based on Fear. Well, we could not accept this. Or could we? Of course not. Or could we?
But back to the example of the party of four. You may ask: what has it got to do with uncertainty. Well, honestly that is the question of the century. I now truly believe with a week of afterthought that intrinsically the party of four enlightened to me the simple fact that in everything there is truly only one certainty in life, apart from death, and taxes of course, that is our certainty that everything in life is an uncertainty. After all, I could never have expected to see this party of four. It may have been truly an ignorance of thought of something truly blissful that transpired, but I am a lot more certain that it was a sign that never expect anything in every thing, rather expect everything in any thing.
O.K
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