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Certitude January 2024

View from Liverpool/Sheffield train window at sunset

"You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes." — Winnie-the-Pooh

In recent months I have renewed/re-cultivated a friendship with my neighbour Phil, a retired Church of England vicar. We meet regularly to sit in his sun lounge, drink coffee and talk about whatever comes to mind. Our shared faith and love of scripture is what brought us together, but it is in sharing our vulnerabilities and failures that our friendship grows strong. I love him for his openness, his trust in me as a listener. Perhaps it is mutual. Sinner becomes saint when the sin is shared, and owned. We have grown close this year, and I greatly value our time together.

A recent conversation of ours explored certainty and certitude. The differences are subtle, but essentially we could say that certainty is rooted in fact while certitude requires faith. Is there an afterlife? Many Christians are certain there is. They are sure the Bible tells them so, and the Bible cannot be doubted. Their life on earth then is propelled by the certainty that if they worship God they go to heaven, and if not they go to hell. The danger here is that if someone were able to prove that heaven and hell don't exist, their religion, their faith, their very purpose evaporates. This faith is conditional, and focused only on the end game, the destination. This is certainty. Another kind of Christian is uncertain about the afterlife, and yet worships God anyway. There is no (known) destination, there is only the journey, the path, the Way. Certitude keeps us on that path, knowing without doubt that it is the right path, wherever it will lead, and however rough the journey. To walk with God is all.

Beyond faith, beyond Christianity or any other religion, we can learn much from this distinction. As we navigate life we use an empirical process, and apply our natural improvisational skills, dealing with problems as they arise, navigating through and around difficulties, reestablishing goals as we need to, as the world changes around us, as better ideas emerge. Most of the pain human beings suffer is from assuming to know. Our knowing cripples us, binds us to imperfection. As soon as we fix an outcome, and create a plan to reach that outcome we close down all possibilities. What is left is only our knowing, our certainty. Interestingly, most of us only ever act this way in the work place—most essentially in the corporate work place. Certainty of outcome is the single most destructive force in the corporate world, causing mental and emotional distress, leading to despair, desperation and, in extreme cases, death by suicide. (I'm thinking of the financial crash of 1929, repeated again in 2008-9.1) In such cases it is always certainty that is at the root of the problem.

Recently, as the realisation takes hold that I am now well ensconced in the latter part of my seventh decade, I have been thinking a lot about old friends—old both in length of our friendship and in their years on earth; I have a growing desire to reconnect, to spend more time with them. Take Janet, my first real girlfriend, not a girl at all in fact, a 33-year-old woman 2 to my 17-year-old self, but we were happy together for almost three years, co-habited and shared our lives until, inevitably, we grew apart. She turns 82 this year; we are still friends, and connected through many shared memories. Then there's my dear friends Hel and Carole, housemates forty-two years ago, staunch friends over the decades, Hel and her mother nursing me back to health and sanity in the late-80s after a particularly bad bout of heroin addiction.

These thoughts and memories, new and old, lead me to my word of the year for 2024: Friendship.3 I didn't choose it, I rather think it chose me. My sister Juliette and I decided a few days ago we need to develop our own sibling-friendship, and spend more time together—consciously. Losing our little sister, Emily, to cancer in 2022, reminds us how precious life is, and sometimes how short. Each other is all we have now in terms of our birth family. Friendship. It's a good focus word for the upcoming year. I have no idea of the outcome of pursuing any of these friendships, or cultivating new ones, but I am certain the journey is a worthwhile one. I have faith. I have certitude.

1 This is well documented in a number of journals, for example Suicide and the Great Recession of 2007-2009, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 116, September 2014
2 Rayna (my wife) turns 33 this year. We laugh about this, the gap between our ages being almost twice as big as the age gap between Janet and me. Age is not just a number, it's a whole complex of numbers...and a great deal of complicated mathematics!
3 My word of the year for 2023 was Possibility, for 2022 Awake, for 2021 Moment, for 2020 Less and for 2019 Big. It's good to have a word to focus on for the year. I thank my friend Surya for seeding the idea.

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December News

We had snow in the first few days of December, but only rain since then. We dreamed of a white Christmas, but received a wet one. It was also windy, with Sheffield trees blowing down and roofs blowing off. We enjoyed our few days of snow though, and hope for more as winter sets in deeper in January.

December was a quiet month. I had some European travel planned but at the last moment discovered my passport was stale. Not expired, just stale. I didn't know a passport needed 3-6 months before the expiry date (depending on the country) to be considered valid—even for a return trip lasting just a few days. Now I know. The UK train strikes also had me stay home more than I'd planned. It's like being back in the 1970s. I did get to visit Liverpool though, for what I refer to as a mentorship day, to walk the streets with Caitlin Walker, a clean language coach whose book, From Contempt to Curiosity greatly inspired me during lockdown, and to have lunch with Jenny Sinclair of T4CG, my partner and guide for the Common Good program we are developing for 16-25 year-olds. I am blessed to have such teachers, and I envisage more trips to Liverpool in 2024, getting out of my corner of the Forest, and cultivating friendship.

With less work towards the latter half of December, and inspired by an artist I spoke with at the local Christmas fair, I gave myself a new creative challenge to make a lino cut print for each of my reflections on Revelation, which covered the last twelve days of the year. It was fun to engage in a new art form. You can see the twelve prints here. Rayna, Asrai and Zoë also became inspired by the medium, creating their own beautiful works and turning our kitchen into a print shop. It was a good way to end 2023.

And here we are again, another January, another year.

"Every man should be born again on January 1. Start with a fresh page." — Henry Ward Beecher, 1813-1887

Good advice. Cast aside your old mistakes, and embark on a journey to make new ones.

Happy new year,
Tobias

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