Being confident is an essential part of your social skills. Writing something – forward – on new year’s eve probably calls for more confidence, with the whole year ahead of you.
I cannot however be confident about something unless I have done the journey and seen the result, and making exactly the same journey again with the same conditions. Until then I can be assured of uncertainty, the less uncertain the better.
To be certain despite uncertainty is to carve a customised view that fits my own need for certainty.
Far from me to cast this opinion on others. Some 80 immobile individuals were uncharacteristically queuing to enter the tube today. People were certain of the queue as they joined, certain of further delay and crowd in small spaces as they enter in to the station, the walkway, the escalators, the platforms, even certain of the congestion when they get on the tube. The distance between this station and the next station is absolutely certain; “short” or “long”, “shorter” or “longer” is an opinion, but the distance told by the distance measurement is certain as scientific proof.
To be certain despite uncertainty is to carve a customised view that fits my own need for certainty. I was certain to pass by an address on exiting the tube, only to find we had already gone further from a second exit. It would probably be a practice more convenient to deal with to say that to pass that address, I have to take a certain exit, rather than any other. To be certain of achieving this 100% in the future will be making this convenient suggestion as a rule. It applies to me but not one who wants to pass by that address.
In the metaphorical desire to visit multiple addresses, there will be many more pieces of information to deal with, and each occasion of visit will be attempt at rerunning a journey undertaken but given the new and changing information, this journey is unlikely to be the same.
The more I take on such journeys, and add more addresses, the more I am assured of the uncertainty provided by sets of information that have come to operate in comfortable parameters to each other, but require adjustment between sets of information. Much I have no control over.
Without the luxury of time travel, I could not read back to histories – subjective views written through and in culture-ridden media. I am, too, indebted and cultivated in culture and its knowledge. To be certain of something then is not something I am certain to attain unless it is something certain in itself.
