How Long Can You Stand Not Knowing?

Yash has been offered a transfer to Toronto. It may be confirmed in March. It may be May. It may fall through. Meanwhile the lease on our flat is up for renewal, there is a school form on the fridge, and my mother needs a knee operation.

Last night I told him that either we decide by Friday that we are going, or I sign for two more years and that is that. He looked at me as if I had slapped him. Was I wrong to want an answer?

Komal, wanting an answer is not wrong. I think what you reached for on Friday was something else. You reached for an end to the waiting, and you were willing to take either answer to get it.

The answer you grab to stop the ache

Nathan Furr and Susannah Harmon Furr have a name for that. He is a professor who studies innovation and she is an entrepreneur. They are married, and in The Upside of Uncertainty they write about the unknown from both sides of a kitchen table. They call it premature certainty. They mean the second-best certainties we seize when we can no longer bear to wait.

A two-year lease signed in anger is one of those. So is “fine, we are going” said in order to be able to sleep.

Their chapter takes its title from a friend’s grandfather, a master mechanic. His rule for the workshop was that you do not force the machinery. If a part will not move, leaning on it harder breaks it.

Patience is not the same as sitting still

You may be bracing for advice to be calm and wait. The Furrs do not give it. They say plainly that waiting is not always right, and that acting is usually how uncertainty gets resolved.

What they recommend is a third thing, between forcing and freezing. They call it nudging. Ask a trusted friend what they see that you cannot. Take one small step, such as a conversation with someone who has made this move. Ask whether stopping something would help as much as starting something.

They add a test for when to act. It is time, they write, when the head and the heart come together. On Friday yours had not. Your head was doing sums and your heart was frightened.

What they did while they waited

The Furrs tell a story against themselves. They badly wanted to move their family to Europe. At a job interview in London, a professor told Nathan, in language I will not repeat, that the move would wreck their finances. They knew he was right.

So they flew home and decided to live properly in the place they were in. They began having her parents over every Monday night. He walked in the hills after work. They bought the cheap local ski pass. If they did leave one day, they reasoned, they would leave with fewer regrets.

The offer that took them to France came years later. I find the Monday dinners the most useful part of the story. Waiting did not mean holding their breath.

Live in the flat you are in

Your mother’s knee does not depend on Toronto. Nor does the school form. Much of what feels blocked is not blocked. It has been swept into the one large unknown.

The Furrs suggest throwing yourself into the present situation and asking one question of it. What would I regret not having done here? That question has answers you can act on this month.

They quote the poet Rilke, who advised a young friend to have patience with everything unresolved in his heart. His phrase for it was “Live the questions now.”

What this is not

None of it means the lease can float for ever. Some dates are real. The authors also admit that waiting well takes a good deal of looking after yourself.

Their point is narrower. Notice when you are deciding in order to know, and when you are deciding in order to stop feeling. The second kind tends to be regretted.

You could tell Yash that. I suspect it would land differently from Friday.