Ambiguity

I left Singapore on Friday. I am in Tokyo now, and I have been enjoying the small shock of walking out of my hotel room each morning into a city where everything is slightly different from what I expect. The signage. The sounds. How clean it is.

Sunday was drizzly and I walked most of it. By late afternoon I wanted to sit somewhere quiet with tea and my book. I opened Google Maps, found a tea room, followed the directions, and ended up on the third floor of a building overlooking a shopping street that closes to cars on weekends. There was a bar style table for two facing the window. I settled in at 5:30. They told me kindly that they closed at six thirty.

I had a few small exchanges with the two women working there. When I left, one of them walked me to the elevator. I stepped in and turned to face the doors, and she bowed. Deep, still, patient, holding it until the doors closed.

I was touched. I also felt uncomfortable, and I could not have told you why.

I mentioned it the next day to a friend who was born here and has lived here her whole life. Her eyes widened. She said the woman had sensed my energy and was showing respect for it.

I am still sitting with that.

Here is what I keep noticing about the whole day. Not one part of it was planned. I did not know I would walk that route, or want tea at that hour, or find that particular room. And the moment that will stay with me longest, the one I would keep if I could only keep one, is the moment I understood least while it was happening.

The thing about not knowing

This trip runs a few months. The plan covers me through mid-September. The Americas are part of it, though not all of it. After September there is nothing written down and no return flight booked.

People ask how I can leave without knowing when I am coming back. The honest answer is that the trip is long enough that planning all of it would have meant planning it badly. The far end of a trip like this is guesswork wearing the clothes of a schedule.

Ambiguity has been coming up in nearly every conversation I have had this month. Someone weighing a move without knowing what the role turns into. Someone leaving before the next thing exists. Someone waiting for the market to settle before committing. Different circumstances, same shape. Each of them waiting to know more before acting, and the knowing is not arriving.

What I think is actually going on is this. We are not uncomfortable with ambiguity. We are uncomfortable with noticing it. The uncertainty was always there. What changes at a pivot point is that it becomes visible, and we mistake seeing it for having created it.

The person with the stable job does not know what next year holds either. They have a calendar, which is a different thing. Booking my return flight would not tell me where I will want to be in October. It would only tell me where I said in August that I would be.

There is a line I think about often. If you do not like where you are, move. You are not a tree.

A tree has to make the best of the ground it landed in. It cannot choose better light or leave a bad neighbour. We can. That is not a small thing, and most of us spend a surprising amount of energy acting as though it were not true. We stay rooted and call it strategy, or patience, or waiting for clarity. But we have feet. The freedom to move is the one advantage the tree does not have, and it is the one we forget we are holding.

The tea room was not on any plan I made. Neither was the bow, and neither was the discomfort, and neither was the sentence my friend said that reframed all of it. I could not have arranged for any of that. I could only have walked out of the room.

One thing to try this week

Think of a decision you have been holding, the one that is waiting on more information.

Write down what you are waiting to know. Then write down what you would do first if you already knew it.

Look at that first step on its own. Most of the time it does not depend on the answer. Book the conversation. Send the message. Open the document. The step is available now. The certainty is not.

Take that step this week and leave the rest open.

What are you waiting to know before you begin?

Patricia