Dependable Certainty in an Uncertain World.

From Robert Greenleaf’s essay “Advices To Servants” comes some great wisdom from a talk he gave after spending ten days in residence as a senior Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Dickenson College. From the talk titled “Liberal Arts Education and the World of Work” comes the following:

I said at the onset that many of the questions that students have asked me during these days I regard as unanswerable except as one ventures into some experiences and learns to respond, in the situation, to the immediate problems one confronts. And to do this one must have learned how to open one’s awareness to receive insight, inspiration, in the moment of need. One must accept that only by venturing into uncertainty with faith that if one is adequately prepared to deal with the ambiguity, in the situation, the answer to the questions will come. The certainty one needs to face the demanding situations of life does not lie in having answers neatly catalogued in advance of the experience. That, in fact is a formula for failure – one is surprised, sometimes demoralized, by the unexpected.

I find this selection quite a relief from what I typically practice, the “formula for failure” of trying to come up with all the answers before I enter into a situation. How much easier it is to simply do some preparation and have some faith that the answers will come. When I can do this, the answers always come, but when I go in with the answers, I always fail. That is a certainty certainly worth remembering.