Are you too certain?

My initial reaction was one of quiet internal embarrassment.

“People who are too certain make me sceptical.” Sisonke Msimang commented from stage whilst interviewing the phenomenal Stan Grant via zoom.

I’ve been accused of this during my early years. Being too certain. Not leaving any room for enquiry, or alternative views. That I own my opinion emphatically and it lures people into assimilating with me rather than opening the dialogue for broader thought.

Years ago, I also noticed it on stage speaking, at times I was over-confident and too pumped up. Admittedly, this is mostly old feedback of which I know from a place of survival in my early years when I felt unsafe. So, I’d make up for it in fake or nervous confidence to be accepted. But reminders such as these bring me to moments where the old rears its head and I notice my longstanding knowing… a need to feel validated by agreement. It’s so subtle these days even I have trouble catching it.

Stan Grant in this interview delved far deeper into the subject citing that the danger of certainty led to far more brutal historical issues than my version of needing validating, but rather ones of colonisation and genocide. That supremacy had certainty attached so deeply in the western democracy, that it forgoes any consideration for anything but extreme individualism. Bringing a self-prophesied right to claim something or someone that simply is not yours.

I know. That was a fair chunk of information right there. But you can see how too much certainty (the extreme kind) may blind us to truths and realities that cloud judgement. All in the pursuit of progress and increasingly unhealthy modern success measures that replicate vanity more than positive impact.

As my dear friend Dwayne Mallard lives by and searches for in his Indigenous culture, on his country, arjaway (another way) I think when we embrace uncertainty, we value the unknown. The possibility. I wonder if we released the need to know and entered more of life with enquiry, curiosity and intent to explore could we change factions, division, and subversive control?

Being, feeling and acting too certain is a signal of something rumbling underneath. The underlying nature possibly insecurity. I know I watch for it in my life as a sign of where my levels of feeling safe or unsafe are. When I find it in me or someone else, I seek compassion and then I find new possibility emerges and with that, much more harmony.

It's worth noticing when certainty is in its extreme.

Uncertainly yours,

Suzanne