True uncertainties

In Ian Morgan Cron's deeply moving memoir about growing up as a child of an alcoholic, he relates a story about wrestling with his wife about letting their children jump off a 40-foot ledge into a spring-water filled quarry in Dorset, Vermont. When his wife finally realizes the nature of his anxiety, she tells him, "Ian, they're not falling; they're jumping." I completely identified with his sense of his life having felt like "spiritual and emotional free fall" - and to realize that taking a leap is a completely different thing from falling.

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If I could adopt this super adorable quote as my life motto, I think I will have achieved success: "When something goes wrong in your life, just yell, 'Plot Twist!' and move on."

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For my senior thesis in Asian American Literature, I managed to combine my degrees in Chemical Biology with English by claiming the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as a lens for understanding translation of language and culture in literature.

I purported that in translation you can achieve accuracy or precision, but not both at the same time. You could literally translate a phrase from say, Chinese, to English, which might be a translation of precision (where you map one word in one language to its counterpart in the other language), but it may not be a translation of accuracy, whereby the meaning and intent is captured as well.

Being able to have either precision or accuracy (but not at the same time) might also be a useful framework for accessing truth in general. Henri Nouwen said it best in his book Reaching Out when he talks about grasping at "true uncertainties" rather than at false certainties.

For someone who loves categories and definitions so much, I struggle with the true ambiguities that are necessary when perceiving Truth.

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The Enneagram (though I hated it at first) really enlightened me to my constant tug-of-war with paradoxes. Being a 6, I vacillate between needing support (societally, spiritually, personally, communally, etc.) and wanting to come at life on my own, out of my own courage and even vulnerability.

And with that, let's now end this post with a cartoon that pretty much sums up my life.