There are only ever going to be two certainties in life: that it is entirely and altogether crazy uncertain, and that it will someday come to an end. In death there is the comfortable certainty of eternity; you will be gone and for you, nothing will ever change again.
So why, in this handful of decades on a speck of dust floating around a bobbing candle flame, would you want to settle into certainty when the only thing truly holding you down is gravity?
We can spend our days hammering down all the potential of our days into comfortable routines and the safety of knowing what comes next, even though we know we’ve only got the barest grasp of what’s going to go down from each moment to the next.
We can cry out when our carefully sculpted plans come undone, and look on the unraveling future with sorrow for how little it lines up with how we imagined it. Or we can embrace it. Learn from it. Grow with it.
We can poke holes in the rules and the expectations, peek through to the other side, invite our nearest dearests along to have a look too, and maybe someday we can widen that gap enough that we see more of the unknown than we ever do of the known.
That’s the only real certainty we can depend on: that there is none.