The Certainty of Uncertainty

In those days when there seemed to be more mottoes and philosophical sentences found framed and hanging on our walls, we remember seeing one which read: “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” It is profoundly simple, and it is always so: Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. And since we lived through yesterday (which was part of our past), and since we seem to be meeting this moment (which only an instant ago was part of our future), perhaps we shouldn’t live in such fear of the future. It is true that these times don’t lend themselves to much relaxed living. It is true that there is much indecision, much contradiction, much mistrust, and that there are many opposing opinions, and that the lives of all of us, are living in some uncertainty. What was once called emergency, sometimes seems to have become commonplace and it isn’t always immediately apparent what we can do about these intrusions upon our peace and plans and purposes. But we can perhaps do something about ourselves inside ourselves. Seneca once said: “Mind anxious about the future is unhappy.” In a sense this may be so, but if this were always literally so, the mind of man would always be unhappy, because even when the over-all picture seems reasonably certain, the individual man is always subject to uncertainties: to accident or illness or unforeseen circumstances that may suddenly sweep away something he has carefully counted on—all of which is to say that there seems to be no way of ridding ourselves of some uncertainty. There always have been and perhaps there always will be things which we cannot certainly foresee: there will always be things of which we could be afraid—except as our faith carries us through our fears. But we must not let the certainty of uncertainty prevent our pursuing constructive plans and purposes. We must not succumb to uncertainty. “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” We lived through yesterday; we are meeting this moment; and with faith we shall meet tomorrow.