Nothing relieves congestion like a healthy dose of ambiguity. Forcing all the gray areas of experience into narrow black and white passages can result in a terrific head cold, at best, and a hardening of the arteries of thought at worst. But ambiguity, taken first thing in the morning, has untold benefits. For most people, it’s not necessary to take another dose at night since the dream world is ambiguity’s country of origin. You will be drawn there whether you like it or not.
Many people don’t like it at all. They prefer to travel on the main road where shadings of opinion have been paved over and familiar fast food signposts arise at regular intervals to alleviate any anxiety about hungering for deeper understanding. Me, I like the winding back roads that sometimes lead to unexpected views. It’s an adventure, a long walk out into the world and into who I am.
I’ve come to believe that the biggest questions I ask myself can’t be answered. Why am I here? How am I embedded in the texture of life? It can be difficult to stay centered on these questions and not wander off the path altogether into the forest of envy, worry, regret. Some days I get so lost I begin to despair that I will ever find my way back. So far, making friends with ambiguity has rescued me more often than not.
Ambiguity exercises the mind while giving the heart a good work out. For example, take the news that a woman in an Idaho Walmart was shot in the head by her two-year-old when he reached into her bag and grabbed her concealed weapon. How to reconcile my sorrow for the unnecessary death of this young woman and for the loss and horror perpetrated on her little boy with my rage that this woman, a research scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, was also a crusader for gun rights, who thus willfully brought this tragedy on herself and her family. What a complicated package of contradictions and complexity embedded in this one ambiguous story.
In the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, ambiguity rears its head again. Buried in the thousands of words I read about freedom of speech is the image of Benjamin Netanyahu grandstanding at the protest march, the iconic wide angle photo of the marching heads of state as reproduced in an Israeli ultra-orthodox newspaper deftly excluding German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Mayor of Paris and a female European Union official. There is also the almost lost fact that, overridingly, the Jewish population of France originated in North Africa. They come from the same ancient Mediterranean soil as the jihadists who have attacked them. They are not as separate as they seem at first glance.
There’s something about Us-and-Them thinking that can be deeply satisfying. We know who we are because we’re nothing like the other guy. But what if we have no idea who the other guy is? And what if our self-awareness is vulnerable to constant manipulation by the powers that be, including the press?
All I really know is what I witness with my own eyes and ears. I know that an elderly woman with a cane in Price Chopper offered me her place in line because I only had one item and I know that her kindness prompted me to talk with her about ice, about falling, about getting old. Now I know her a little bit, even if I don’t know her name. If I got to know her better, there would undoubtedly be occasions of disconnect. But right now, she somehow exists in my experience without the need to say yes, but. Every now and then it’s a relief to give ambiguity a rest.
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Susie Kaufman is a retired Hospice chaplain. Her spiritual writing has appeared in America, Lilith, and Presence magazines. She is a regular at the IWOW open mic at the Deb Koffman Artspace in Housatonic. A presenter at the 2015 Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, Susie’s story “The Edge of Elsewhere” will be published in Writing Fire: Celebrating the Power of Women’s Words, forthcoming from Green Fire Press in 2015. She is seeking a publisher for her novel, Otherwise.
The weekly EDGE WISE column is curated by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D., associate professor of comparative literature, gender studies and media studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Women writers interested in publishing in EDGE WISE can find writers’ guidelines on the Festival website, or may submit queries or columns to Jennifer@berkshirewomenwriters.org.
