If you’re anything like me, you start each day off the same way. My eyes open. I have just woken up, therefore I know I am alive. I know my name, my age and my general feelings about most of the common things in my day-to-day life. I know that my partner is next to me. I know that the sun is up and the room is dark — save for the few light beams making their way quietly and ever so patiently through the shade.
I know that if I keep laying in bed, I will be late for class. So I get up and go about the things that I am used to doing — the things I know how to do. Pull on clothes before shoes. Brush my teeth repeatedly for an appropriate amount of time. Smooth out the frizzled edges of my hair. These are the habitual activities that cushion the parts of my life worth remembering. Day in and day out, I conduct these strange rituals, preparing myself for the world by hiding my most natural form and then decaying into it at the end of each night.
I know these acts well. Perhaps, by now, they’ve become so common and habitual that they make up my life and all the other parts are spontaneous anomalies brought about by chance. In either case, I go to class because first-generation college students in debt don’t have time to ponder the anomalies of the universe, at least not before breakfast.
My schedule tells me where I need to go, so, of course, I do, never stopping to ask why in the process; I think I know. There's a soft-spoken man who seems to be full of dreams — the ones that are crafted while awake and painted while you sleep — and reads us poetry. He knows this poem well. Certainty smoothly saturating each syllable. The words feel like the blanket my mother swaddled me in and my eyes feel like cotton so I take the gesture with happy acceptance and try not to drown myself in the metaphors known to the world, at least not before breakfast.
As our professor talks through the formulated syllabus, he shows his knowledge of the course. He knows that if we follow the guidelines of the class we will learn sufficiently. I think I know what this all means. I think I will be fine. So I mindlessly move my feet to the next class when he is done talking, because my body and mind have already collaborated to get me there with the least amount of effort. I don’t need to know how to get to class, I just go. (But still, I do know how to get there, and that at exactly the same time my second teacher of the day will be there, sitting in the same chair without a desk, waiting for our arrival.)
He speaks the language of teachers, which by this point of spending a lifetime behind the walls of school doors, I know how to interpret. He holds out a dry erase marker between two steady fingers and turns to me “What will happen when I open my fingers, releasing the marker?” Simple, I think. I know the marker will fall. “Are you absolutely certain that the marker will fall?” I think I know. “But why?” I know of the concept of gravity. I know that if an object drops then it should fall. I know that heavy things fall. I know that an object in motion should stay in motion. I know how this works.
“But how do you know for certain?”
Due to my past knowledge of dropping things, if this is anything at all like that, then the marker should fall. “Then you only think the marker will fall, but you don’t know then because you aren’t sure what will happen to this exact marker at this exact time.” He opens his fingers and the marker falls to the floor as I predicted. “Of course you predicted the marker would fall to the floor, that’s the answer I expected and you all likely expected. In fact to think otherwise would be quite idiotic. But, you don’t know. Past experience does not guarantee future occurrence and so we live each day never really knowing what will happen. To live is a sea of uncertainty.” Something I knew, but never really considered.
After class, I take an uncertain walk to my uncertain home and do my homework — because I think I should — in uncertain silence. That night I rest the weight of my uncertainty upon my mattress and tuck it into bed with me, all the while unsure of the prospect of waking the next morning.
I fall asleep not knowing if the sea of uncertainty will carry me away at riptide.
The moral of the story, if one exists, is that no matter how knowledgeable you are, you never know what might happen to you throughout the day. We often take our lives for granted, somewhere consciously knowing that at any moment we can die or fall in love or be changed forever, but never really embracing the reality of that. There is danger in this. We don’t say the things we deeply feel and often yell out the things we don’t. Nothing is promised. Every moment is simply an experiment — and furthermore an experience — waiting to happen.
