Stepping into the Unknown

For the last several months, most Pakistanis have woken up every morning wondering what unexpected twist of politics awaits them, a bit like the film, Don’t Look Up – will the meteor hit the earth or can it be turned into an advantage?

One can argue that every next moment of our lives is a step into the unknown. The Sufis urge us to live in the present as we cannot change the past and cannot know the future. Yet from the time of our birth, we are programmed to plan our lives. We seek the security of the familiar, walk the well-trodden path. As Churchill said “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened”, reluctant to challenge their well-established beliefs.

Yet human society has depended on those who willingly step into the unknown - scientists, engineers, inventors, educators, explorers and all those working to extend the edges of knowledge.

All the Prophets stood up armed only with faith, convincing the one, and then the many, of their message, taking on the resistance of years of established beliefs. This is best symbolized by Moses persuading his people to leave the comfort of their homes in Egypt and follow him across the inhospitable Sinai peninsula.

Migration today is a plane ride for most, with only paperwork standing between them and their new life. 25,000 years ago, migrants crossed from Siberia and East Asia across the now submerged Beringia, to North America. 50,000 years ago South Asians migrated to Australasia.  200,000 years ago, the Mitochondrial Eve, from whom all living humans descend, ventured out from Makgadikgadi in modern Botswana. Each forward step was to a land and a life unknown, with no maps, no videos of what lay ahead.

Shams Tabrizi said “It is pointless trying to know where the way leads. Think only of the first step. The rest will come”.

There are many less dramatic examples of those who embrace the unknown. A hiker takes along a backpack full of equipment, food and medicines, for any situation that may lie ahead. A toddler taking its first steps, a young person joining a new school, college or university, a soldier drafted for a war in a foreign land, have no way of knowing what lies ahead. 

The world we live in today is in flux, challenging most of the accepted social, political and economic values and beliefs. VUCA, an acronym for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous, first used by United States Army War College after the 9/11 attack in 2001, is a concept increasingly adopted by businesses, designers, planners and strategists. It assumes change is rapid and unpredictable, the present is unclear, the future uncertain, there is chaos and confusion, and a lack of clarity. A VUCA environment can destabilize people, cause anxiety, and jeopardize long term projects.  

The best response is to embrace change as a constant, have a clear vision, seek collaborative thinking, counteract the lack of predictability with more information, and develop clarity in communication. As blogger Henry Mukuti says, business as usual has to be business unusual.

Psychologists observe that the unknown represents one of humanity’s fundamental fears, making us reluctant to embrace change. Yet not only is change inevitable, we are drawn to it. Nancy Hillis, artist and psychiatrist, compares it to reading a book, “what keeps you reading is not knowing what’s coming next and wanting to find out how it all turns out”. Creative people are not only most comfortable with unpredictability but actively seek it, constantly experimenting, and stepping into the unknown.

The most viable method of dealing with the unknown has been termed “the adjacent possible” by biologist, Stuart Kauffman. By not aiming for an extreme change, but working with existing knowledge and processes, it is possible to take that all important first step. Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible  “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself”, while accepting current limitations.  In other words, new ideas start at the edge of the known.

As Shams Tabrizi says “Patience is not sitting and waiting, it is foreseeing. It is looking at the thorn and seeing a rose, looking at the night and seeing the day.”

 

Durriya Kazi

November 24, 2022

Karachi

durriyakazi1918@gmail.com