Be less certain
Here's an excerpt of a speech I read or listen to at least once a year
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”
This is a story that David Foster Wallace shares in his commencement address to Kenyon College's graduating class of 2005.
The big question that the story leaves me with is: how do I know I'm right?
It is easy to be entrenched in our beliefs, brimming with certainty of the rightness of our perspective. Like the atheist. It might very well be true that his rescue was just mere coincidence. But to not even consider any other possibility other than what his mind conceives, is really just blindness.
What if we leave space open for the possible and all the possibilities it brings? If we can just add a dash of uncertainty, a pinch of humility, and a splash of curiosity — what would we be like? What could our lives look like?