(Un)certainty

This ominous, silhouetted figure and the high-contrast CRT-TV background are reminiscent of early-internet creepypastas, or the many modern indie-horror games that seek the same aesthetic.

This genre often has meta elements that aim to shift the horror of the story from the game or forum or video into your own life. I get this feeling when I see the image and in this way the caption becomes a pop-up “tool-tip” to help me succeed, while the watching figure is an enigmatic NPC ready to help me on my journey.

I interpret his mandate in two ways:

The first is a practical way regarding certainty of outcome. Every worthwhile project requires most of the effort to be expended before knowing whether or not it will be successful. I garden, which means investing the time to plant, water and care for my veggies weeks or months before any sort of harvest. Writing a novel means many hours labouring over a keyboard before knowing whether it will be any good. Even starting this series is taking hours of my life when there is no assurance it will garner any attention at all. There are many such cases.

In a more abstract way, proceeding without certainty means anti-fundamentalism, rejecting easy, universal answers to life’s problems in favour of a more humble ambiguity. I was raised in such a family and in such a way that I grew up thinking I had all the answers and that those answers were nothing more than common sense. Adulthood has taught me all the ways in which those answers were lacking, and rejecting certainty means I can admit when I was wrong about something. I can not have the answers and I can grow and I can change and I believe I am a better man for it.

Clinging to certainty means never taking risks and never reaping the rewards, never feeling at peace admitting I was wrong, and becoming a stagnate version of myself, cast in stone.

Luckily for me, I have this mysterious figure to point me down the right path.