The Pleasure of Uncertainty
expanding our range into the unknown
As I write this, we are waiting for our Covid test results. Last weekend, our daughter was with a friend who tested positive and so, like so many humans around the world, we are on edge, calculating probabilities with the accuracy of amateur statisticians, wondering about the impact of a trip to the grocery store, the touch of a banister, the flush of a cheek.
It is our nature to want to know the unknowable. Uncertainty has always been with us in our private spaces: Will this relationship last? Will the tumor grow? Will my child return home? How many weeks left? Is she the one? Why me?
Now, we are facing uncertainty together. As a country and around the world, we are watching maps turn yellow, then orange, and red as pandemic hot zones flare up everywhere. Uncertainty is not new. 45 million of us around the world are already displaced by conflict and climate crisis.
One of the many lessons of 2020 are these: No one is immune. We may be next. Nothing is certain.
We are given many tools, helpful or not, to cope with uncertainty. These tools have certainly made themselves known over the last 8 months and we’ve tried them (or we haven’t). But what would happen if we loved uncertainty? What if we welcomed it with open arms, brought it into our homes and made sure it was welcome? Can we create pleasure, not despite uncertainty, but with it?
Here’s what we’ve learned so far:
Uncertainty is a form of wonder
We tend to associate uncertainty with fear but it can also be associated with something positive, like, why did that stranger just hand me a dollar? In that instance, uncertainty can make us more appreciative and for longer than if we know the answer.
What if instead of saying “I don’t know” we said, “I wonder…”?
Our experience is what we attend to - William James
Squeeze your left fist into a ball. Hard, until your fingernails bite the skin of your palms. Keep your right hand open and relaxed. Notice your left hand, give the pain a number between 1 and 10. Now bring your attention to your right hand. Did the pain lessen when your focus was on your relaxed hand? I learned this from trauma researcher Laurie Leitch who teaches people to build resilience by attending to what is pleasurable rather than focusing on the wound.
Which also applies to uncertainty. While I await our Covid test results, I am doubling down on my pleasure—dancing, walking in the woods, cooking. It seems to be working.
Uncertainty ≠ Fear
Uncertainty can lead us down the rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios, which, if unchecked, leads to the release of adrenaline and cortisol, an experience we recognize as fear. Fear is faster than logic, which is great for running from lions but it takes a toll on our other systems like our digestion and immune response. Even though the constant IV-drip of fear stimulates us, our bodies are not built for constant stress.
Uncertainty is not synonymous with fear. If in doubt, spend some time with a baby. Or animals. They know all about this.
Uncertainty + Fear = Vulnerable
We learn fear from our lived experience but we also learn it from observation. And by instruction. In heightened states of fear, we regress to tribalism, which can easily be weaponized. “When demagogues manage to get hold of our fear circuitry,” says Arash Javanbakht, Professor of Psychiatry at Wayne State University. “We often regress to illogical, tribal and aggressive human animals, becoming weapons ourselves -- weapons that politicians use for their own agendas.”
One antidote to being manipulated by fear is to build communities centered not around fear but pleasure. Or desire. Or fun. Or creativity. It’s an act of resistance, a reclamation of autonomy to play a game of soccer, to join a chess club or go walking with friends.
YES! the uncertainty.
Stasis is lovely and good for rest but the unknown drives us to create. It’s the foundation for our quest for meaning, purpose, for god, something more than ourselves.
There is a practice I learned from The School of Womanly Arts called Yes! It’s counterintuitive but it works. Regardless of how intense the trauma—the divorce, the death, the abuse or loss, the invitation is to jump up and down wildly (on a trampoline if possible), arms pumping in the air shouting YES! until you are totally exhausted.
I wouldn’t recommend it if I hadn’t witnessed the physical transformation of women owning their experience, their grief and loss, their fear of the unknown. It’s more than acceptance, it’s an enthusiastic embrace, a commitment to what is.
Expand your range
We derive a lot of pleasure out of being able to predict what will happen. But, too little surprise and we get bored. Too much and we become distressed. For each of us, there is a sweet spot where unpredictability and the pleasure meet. We can expand that range by practicing new things like listening to atonal music. This study found that listening to more dissonant music generated more pleasure as listeners learned to recognize more complex patterns.
Here’s to expanding our range.
Photo from by Celeste Sloman From the NYTimes “You are Your Safest Sex Partner: Betty Dodson Wants to Help”
On Saturday, October 31st 2020, our world lost a pleasure hero; Betty Anne Dodson. She was 91 years young and committed to her mission of pleasure for everyone until the end. We take this moment to reflect on the mothers and grandmothers of this work. Betty Dodson was one of them. Her radical consciousness raising workshops with genital show-and-tells, vibrators and group masturbation were bold and shame-shattering. She empowered people, she enraged people, she taught generations, she made people confront the uncomfortable, all in the name of unapologetic pleasure and we thank her for it. We thank her for the trail she blazed so that we may make our own and we mourn the loss of her presence and knowledge in this world. May we all strive to be as bold, fearless and in love with ourselves as she was. (Olivia Hockenberry, TPR)
From the Institute for Pleasure Studies
Sunday, Nov. 15, 3-5 PM EST. Join Bernadette Pleasant, Founder of The Emotional Institute for Femme! a 2-hour emotional tour through joy, rage, and more to reach a place of catharsis and empowerment. Open to all.
Also on Sunday, the Alchemy of Breath offers free breath work sessions. Learn how your own breath can give you information about yourself or your situation, that you didn’t have or know already.
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem is part workbook, part bible, a gift for these unwieldy times. Menakem helps readers get inside the black experience to encounter everyday threats and the responses of fighting, fleeing, or freezing and guides readers toward healing through guided exercises and social commentary. His interview with Krista Tippet is beautiful.
I am beyond fortunate to be working with an incredible team of researchers and pleasure activists. Today, I introduce you to Olivia Hockenberry, who has been shaping my ideas into coherent notes for the past two years. She is an educator who works with young children and is a fierce advocate of bringing pleasure in our classrooms and school hallways.
Pleasure is not universal and does not exist in a vacuum. I acknowledge the breadth of pleasure, or the lack of it, that I cannot know as a white, cis-gendered, able bodied and bisexual woman. We are here to learn about our pleasure and the pleasure of others and how we can create a world rooted in that.
— Olivia Hockenberry
Thank you for reading. For subscribing. For joining this adventure.
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Until next week,
Sue Jaye Johnson
Wef
Wellfleet, MA, 2020 - SJJ