Andy Goldsworthy’s art exemplifies balance in nature.
Dear R&A Community,
As we collectively hold our breath, waiting for the results of the presidential election, I thought of a post by the artist and writer Suleika Jaouad that speaks to the difficulties of tolerating ambiguity. She was reflecting on a time in her life after she had beaten cancer and before she was about to embark on a months long cross country road trip, an experience that ultimately led to her first book Between Two Kingdoms. She was starting to feel disoriented and uneasy about the mixture of freedom and uncertainty that this opportunity in her life might afford her, when it dawned on her “that there was a freedom in the in-between place—when you can’t go back to life before, but you’re not quite sure what lies ahead,”.
It got me thinking again about how hard it is to even approach these in-between places without having been forcibly pushed there by the turmoil and churn of life, let alone to viscerally experience their liberatory qualities. Further, once we arrive in these liminal spaces, why is it so difficult to tolerate the unknown and engage with our lives in novel ways?
Lisa Feldman-Barrett, a neuropsychologist, gives us some clues as to why tolerating the in-between places of growth and change are so hard or taxing for all of us. She recently wrote in the Scientific American about how advances in understanding our brains’ networks (e.g. Default Mode Network, Salience Network) are strengthening a neurological model that debunks the conventional wisdom that specific “fight or flight” circuitry exists that is activated by reactions to threat or the unknown. Instead, Feldman-Barrett contends, we exist in a lived experience composed of predictions. She summarizes that our “brain doesn’t react to the world—it predicts in advance how to act and what to experience in the next moment,”. This feels like a seismic change in thinking to me, we don’t react, we predict…what?!
The metaphor I am using to help me understand this new model is imagining the brain as a kind of five star concierge service that is constantly trying to anticipate and meet our needs before they arise, to guide us through dealing with our environmental demands and internal needs efficiently. When we are faced with new, unknown or threatening situations, our neurological systems have to work harder to collect and collate information to update our predictive models. In short, it seems we do not have a “fight or flight” system of circuitry that is activated in the face of something unknown or dangerous, it is more likely that our brains have to move into a process of foraging or searching for new data points to incorporate into our predictive modeling of how life is supposed to go.
Feldman-Barrett explains that: “Too much uncertainty is metabolically draining and can leave you feeling distraught and worn out. But these feelings don’t emerge from mythical, overtaxed fight-or-flight circuits. They may just mean, in an ever changing and only partly predictable world, that you’re doing something really hard.”
There is an inherently compassionate invitation in this emerging knowledge to deeply accept that encountering uncertainty is metabolically draining. It is hard to do new things and to engage with the unknown, it is just how we are wired. Evidence of our exhaustion, back peddling into more familiar, perhaps less emotionally or existentially gratifying ways of doing things is part of our efficiency wiring, or proof of our brain’s efforts to protect us from the energy depletion associated with foraging through the wilds of the new and unknown.
This whole process of balancing our brains’ predictive capacities and drive towards metabolic efficiency with our capacity to learn something new and adapt to changes in our environment is called allostasis. I would imagine that our allostatic balancing act creates many experiences when we experience being out of sync with and then trying to readjust with what we directly perceive as happening around us.
I wonder about the accumulation of all these moments of being in and out of rhythm with the demands of our environment and how it might invite some ongoing, healthy skepticism from our inner, deep compass of knowing when our predictions are “accurate” and when they need to incorporate something new. It might be why there is such an emphasis on identifying and connecting to a “Core Self” or “True Self” in so many psychotherapeutic and spiritual traditions. Why it is so important to be able to feel and viscerally experience our knowledge about when to stick with our status quo and when to forage to find new ways to engage with ourselves, others and the world around us.
In the meantime, be gentle with yourselves if your system is getting overloaded with foraging for new data in this uncertain time. There might be a reason you might feel drained, it’s how our perfectly imperfect, efficient seeking selves are wired.
With profound hope for peace and civility in these coming days and weeks.
Warmly,
Courtney Rennicke, Ph.D.
Director, Rennicke & Associates
Foraging by Sreeju Radhakrishnan
