The adventure in uncertainty

Last week, I spoke at two events. In a class on environment and the media, I talked about navigating career shifts. At a student event for budding diplomats, I gave a workshop on extemporaneous speaking. In both events, I saw fearful, uneasy students.

It was like I was looking at echoes of my past self: of that time when I had to escape the comfort zone of a field that no longer felt like home, of my first time participating in a public speaking competition.

“How do you even deal with the uncertainty?” a student asked.

The fear is understandable.

Second-guessing one’s career decisions feels more dangerous now. We live in a war-torn world and a weak economy, and changing careers is a risk only the privileged can safely take. Speaking in public is almost unthinkable, not only because many of today’s students were not trained for years (I am eternally grateful to my high school for this!), but also because their fear of being humiliated on social media overrides their desire to use their voices for good.

There isn’t such a thing as zero preparation, however. The students ruminating on a career shift also tended to be writers, public speakers, and photographers who had found fulfillment in their work. Their training, the essays they had written, the talks they had given, the pictures they had taken—they had all spoken back in murmurs growing ever louder, until the students realized that they had already found their calling and needed only to listen to it.

Those afraid of extemporaneous speaking already have the tools they need. If they read widely, appreciate a broad range of art, and take joy in learning new things, then public speaking is their chance to show how all the preparation can be understood as an integrated whole.

The uncertainty seems frightening only because it feels as though the students are casting themselves into a great emptiness over which they have no control.

How different this is from the origins of risk!

Risk goes back centuries to the Arabic “rizq,” a provision that God gave to good believers, especially before a journey of uncertainty. This was most relevant to traders, who had to ply their caravans across great expanses of nothingness: desert, sea, mountains. The rizq was a contract: it meant placing trust in God, surrendering to mercy, and accepting the unknown.

When risk was secularized, it became something so feared that people devised tools and strategies to control it. The fear of emptiness, however, remained. It is a fear that extends beyond trade and investment, and it seeps deeply into how we perceive careers, conversations, and conflict today.

Last week, Pope Leo XIV spoke his loudest and best against the war in the Middle East. God did not bless any conflict, the Pope said, in near-direct response to the politicians who paraded their work as divinely inspired. On X, the Pope wrote: “No gain can be worth the life of the weakest, children, or families. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood.”

In support, our diocese asked parishes to hold a Holy Hour for Peace. I was one of the volunteers who led the prayers at ours. As we sat in silence, I remembered something that the Pope’s bashers always commented on: the Pope’s condemnation should have been directed at Iran, which had committed many human rights violations.

True, other commenters responded, but how is further violence and death the answer to evil? How does war undo the damage already done?

Justifying bombs as the answer to violence exists in the same space as ex-President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, or the response his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, is making to accusations of corruption. They are all sweeping, uncompromising, and unimaginative solutions to perceived problems. They are attempts to burn bridges and raze fields because a leader refuses to use their intellect to strategize, their capacity to imagine, their strength to dream.

That, perhaps, is what is most frightening about uncertainty. Its very nature makes us imagine the worst-case scenario immediately: humiliation, loss, death. Perhaps that, too, is why the Artemis II mission captivated many: at a time of uncertainty, it showed that people of different ethnicities could cooperate, that men could embrace and cry without being ridiculed, that women could comprise the majority of a successful technical group without being stigmatized.

That uncertainty, whether an unnamed career or unplanned speech, whether in the middle of a war or on the edge of space, should invite us all to look beyond our fears—to accept that not everything can be controlled, but we must make the journey anyway.

I shifted careers and became all the better for it. I won second place in that first time as an extemporaneous speaker. At the end of both events last weekend, I saw smiles. At the end of our prayers, I felt grounded once again.

To face uncertainty is to imagine adventure. And when we have crossed our great emptiness, perhaps we can look back in gratefulness at how we dreamed bigger, and how we rebelled with unflagging hope.

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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu