not knowing my future on this holy in between day

this week alone multiple events i was looking forward to attending months from now got cancelled. in some cases the decisions absolutely had to be made this week due to refund deadlines or other financial considerations. in other cases, it seemed like the decisions got made perhaps from other considerations including something as simple as fear of uncertainty.

i understand this. many times i took jobs, moved or broke up with people just to resolve ambiguity. for years i literally preferred making the wrong decision to indecision. nothing was more intolerable to me than not knowing.

now the whole world is in a state of not knowing. we don’t know whether we’ll be in a shut down for weeks, months or years. we don’t know whether the economy will ever recover. we don’t know whether our job will continue or even whether anybody will continue to pay us for anything at all. we don’t know if we’re healthy or infected. we don’t know whether our loved ones will be stricken. it’s a lot to cope with.

in some respects, this not knowing has been true every day of my life. i never really know whether the bedrocks of my existence will continue to be there. i learned this lesson early in life when my father died when i was 23 years old. he was only 55. i talked to him one day and the next day he was dead of a heart attack. no warning. no goodbye. no nothing. just gone.

i experienced that as a tectonic shift. if my father could disappear from my life overnight then anything could. ever since then, i’ve basically assumed that every person, job, situation in my life was subject to change. except that i’m lying because i behave as if all of the institutions, people and events will persist indefinitely. every year my husband and i go to buffalo, ny in the summer. every year we go to hardly strictly bluegrass festival in san francisco the first weekend of october. these are sacred events.

speaking of sacred, it is perhaps fitting that i discuss, as buddhist nun pema chodron put it, “the wisdom of in between,” on the day in between good friday and easter sunday. today, in the holy christian story, is the day sitting between the crucifixion and the resurrection. the day of not knowing. or perhaps, it was the day of thinking you know that jesus is dead come to find out he is risen.

and there you go. i launched right into the wisdom of this in between time without really saying i was doing so. many traditions, buddhist, christian and otherwise have written about the rich wisdom of sitting in discomfort, the wisdom of the in between place. what energy, space and consciousness can me and my body be to destroy and uncreate the polarity between certainty and uncertainty and to allow that which is in between certainty and uncertainty to be the way it is?