Remember The Weatherperson?
/By Concentric Counselor Christian Younginer, LPC, NCC
What We Wish Life Were Like
The Curiosity rover landed on Mars August 6th, 2012, the end of a flight that began November 26th, 2011-- 9 months prior. At its traveling speeds, all predetermined by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), scientists had to calculate where an orbiting planet would be 9 months from the moment of launch. In fact, they needed to know where Mars would be years in advance as they began building and programming the rover. They were able to plan for, predict, and pinpoint the location of a planet hurtling through space at 53,600 mph, rotating at 532 mph down to the meter to land a rover on its surface.
This is possible due to the predictability of the celestial bodies. Astronomers from thousands of years ago plotted out eclipses for hundreds of generations into the future, with impressive accuracy. It’s that there just aren’t very many variables in space; bodies in motion stay in motion, unless a force acts on them. And if no force does, they keep on trucking. Thus, their location is predictable. This does not mean that any part of landing a rover on another planet is easy--it’s just possible.
What Life Is Actually Like
Conversely, it is a common occurrence that shuttle launches are cancelled, last minute, tanks fueled, on the pad- due to weather… Earth weather. A shuttle, bound for space, to another planet, is grounded because humans cannot accurately predict the weather more than a couple of days out. And even then it can be a crapshoot.
The reason for this comes down to something much more akin to living life: variables and information. There are simply too many variables to predict and too much information we’re not able to know. For example, if I knew the direction and velocity of every air particle on Earth, I could give you an accurate weather model. Obviously, this is not possible. So we’re left making educated guesses, working with what we have, and most importantly a social understanding that forecasts are guesses, not gospel. With this understanding comes a grace--sometimes annoyance--but a grace for being wrong. An ‘it’s out of our hands’ amenableness that wonderfully conflicts with the modern American desire for planning, preparation, and predictability.
What Can We Do?
So often we try to plan for every eventuality, scrutinizing the details, languishing in an anxious mire of a desire for control, only to see our plans crash into a Martian hillside, due to an unforeseen variable.
Often, the anxious try to view life with such a level of predictability. Hopes that the world will fit into plans and preparations, only to be disappointed when something unaccounted for goes awry. Often times this desire for control flows into our lives as a nagging generalized anxiety, a worry for all things in an effort to be prepared for every outcome. We wish life were as predictable as space travel. As oxymoronic as it sounds, going about our day may be more complicated than rocket science. And we tell ourselves that the stakes are just as high.
As mentioned in regards to weather, the secret lies in the ability to tolerate the ambiguity of an uncertain system. We can be disappointed with an inaccurate weather report, but continue on to the next day. Yes it can suck when it rains when the news said it wouldn’t, but we don’t hold ourselves responsible for the outcome. In our own lives, we can place an enormous amount of responsibility on ourselves, often for things not in our control. We can assault ourselves with a barrage of ‘should have planned for it’ , ‘should have seen it coming’, or ‘should have done it differently’. All of which are the equivalent of looking at Tuesday’s weather and telling yourself you should’ve known that on Monday.
Maybe we can have the same grace for the weatherperson, AND with ourselves. If we get it wrong, be disappointed for a bit, be annoyed, but let it go. Tomorrow is another day to try again. If we find ourselves feeling anxious about the ambiguity of life, rather than try to think out the outcomes, what if we gave ourselves permission to feel anxious for a bit? Feeling anxious about the ambiguity of every day is not a failing, but rather an admission to one’s self that we don’t have enough information. And instead of punishing ourselves for trying to know something we can’t, maybe we can have a little grace with ourselves, and remember the weatherperson.