Uncertainty

It’s pretty uncertain times at the moment.

When will schools reopen?

When will I be able to see my family again?

Will I continue to have my teaching job?

Will this go on during summer too?

Our trip we have planned for July - is that going to be cancelled?

So many questions with no answers. Unanswered questions creates uncertainty for me and that’s a feeling I don’t enjoy.

I like knowing. I like having answers. I like having plans that I know will happen. 

BUT - can we really ever be sure of ANYTHING? 

Now that coronavirus is the main topic of conversation these days, our minds are filled with the unknowns. We are constantly focusing on what we can’t control and what we don’t know. But if you think about it, we never really know for 100% certainty that anything we plan, anything we currently have, or if any of our current or future circumstances will remain as we’d expect.

For example: 

We plan a trip to visit family in the summer. Everything is organized, booked and ticked off the list. We know in our brains that we are going on this trip and we can’t wait. 

Until our partner gets extremely sick, or someone in our household breaks a bone, or a flight gets cancelled and the trip has to be rescheduled. We believed we were going on this trip. We believed this trip was supposed to happen. But it didn’t. 

The difference between this trip and corona is that we didn’t spend the whole time thinking about our trip possibly being cancelled. We didn’t spend time thinking about all the things that we wouldn’t be able to do. Instead we spent time thinking about how amazing it was going to be. And then things changed and we couldn’t go. 

Another example is as a teacher we get told we are going to teach a certain grade the next year. We get told grade 2 is on the cards for us and then at the last minute we get told we are teaching a ⅔ split. What? That’s not what I had planned. 

We always thought and believed that we knew what was going to be come September, but we didn’t. We just thought we did. 

Or

Our child says they want noodles for lunch so you make a big batch of noodles because you know that your child wants to eat that. That’s what they said. So that’s what is going to happen, right? 

Noodles all fresh and cooked in the coolest bowl in the cupboard and you put it down in front of your child and you hear “No like noodles”. But I thought you wanted noodles? I thought that’s what we were going to have for lunch. But nope. Plans change, even if we think we know how everything is going to unfold. 

So although life can feel pretty uncertain at the moment, just know, that this is always the case. It’s just we don’t spend as much time thinking or focusing on the what ifs as we currently are. 

We believe in our minds that everything will go as planned but that isn’t a guarantee until it has gone as planned and we’re actually doing that thing. Then we know for sure that it was supposed to be that way. 

xo