Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Learning From Uncertainty

This quote from Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s popular book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed World, sums up how things have felt in recent months.

Professionally, there’s been a lot going on. New opportunities for growth, important deliverables for the client, a massive multi-site, multi-discipline, week-long audit and survey with huge impact on my professional standing and, more importantly, on the reputation of my customer. There have also been changes in the team, new initiatives, and the day-to-day work of keeping my piece of the business moving in the right direction.

Personally, I’ve been doing some rebuilding. A lot of rebuilding, actually, as I work towards developing new habits to better serve my mental and physical health, stay better connected to my family and friends, who I haven’t spent as much time with in the last three months as I would have liked, and reconnect with aspects of my personality and belief system that I’ve become disconnected from. They’ve been patient—my friends and family, and those beliefs and tenets—and I am grateful to them for this and many other reasons.

With all of this, there’s been plenty of uncertainty and plenty to learn from. Through it all, I feel like I’m learning more about keeping things in perspective and getting marginally better at finding balance. Still, there’s plenty to do, but I’m making progress.

The trick, I think, is understanding that uncertainty is relentless. Because of that, it is best embraced, or at least not seen as a negative. Stoicism teaches us not just to tolerate but to embrace what happens in our lives, including the unknown.