Keeping Comfort in Place

   At a recent party I was drawn into a discussion on self-help books and the many Guru’s out there who could go on for so long over what they claimed to be a simple solution to encumbering problems. I mentioned in my experience real life couldn’t be distilled into platitudes.  Yet, the consuming public would never tire of seeking a silver bullet to their complaints.

   “They want change to be effortless; the humor of it is that change is totally without effort; the real struggle comes with trying to keep our comfort in place.”

  So really, how many road signs does anyone need to get to their destination?  I’ve traveled enough to know there are plenty of notices on the Freeway announcing which exit ramp to take in order to find the town center.  And they are numerously more frequent the closer you get to the critical departure point; plus, they are unambiguous.  Yet, I see all too often people swerving across congested lanes of traffic to make their exit at the very last minute; as if it were a divine surprise lurking in the shadows suddenly revealing itself.

  We get distracted in our chatter; just as we entertain the doubts we conjure up as being real.  Isn’t that the true hiccup of any effort to be correct? So many words are troublesome while being used interchangeably.  Such is the case with certainty. 

  Certainty is the acceptance of a fact without doubt.  It is a level of confidence attributed to particular knowledge; that’s where we get struck on the tar-baby.  Knowledge always contains a kernel of doubt, because knowledge is an open proposition; it is absent of absolute ~ like perfection.  So the best any can hope to be, from an objective point of view, is within a degree of certainty.  The exception being, the subjective meaning as clearly a personal certainty; then embraced as a fact ruling an individual universe of choice.  In that alone, is where certainty remains unchallenged; by the confines of the one making a choice; for the one who trust, and then believes, their choice is correct for them; and them alone.  The term certainty is often used to describe knowledge without the possibility of doubt.  This is omniscience. It is an improper use of the term.  So we all live within the obscure and inexact symbols of our language and find comfort and confidence in the meaning of certainty as allowing us the possibility of error, but the contextual lack of doubt.  As Bob Dylan alluded to many years ago, “The only thing we have in common is that we will all die.”  Now that, is a shared certainty.