By Dawna Atamanchuk and Lee Norris.
Ambiguity has always been part of life. It is not new. For centuries, people have faced uncertainty, from whether the weather would affect the crops to simple daily choices like what to make for dinner. The real work is not making ambiguity disappear. The real work is finding your own tempo.
Tempo means finding a pace that lets you sit with yourself. It means slowing down enough to observe how you are responding to something, instead of just reacting and moving on. This is hard because most of us move fast. When you are walking quickly because you have somewhere to be, your brain is focused on the destination. You do not have room to notice what you are feeling.
Ambiguity is not born from a lack of information; it comes from a question of “What does this mean?”. Uncertainty is the reaction based upon our question of “What will happen?”.
In very simple terms when we assess a situation as ambiguous which means we are unclear (or uncertain) how to interpret it, we can either become RESISTING (fearful) or ACCEPTING (calm) in the face of uncertainty. If we resist for a long period, then this can go deeper than an emotion and become a mood. The mood state associated with resisting ambiguity and uncertainty is “Anxiety”. However, if we surrender and let go, i.e. we accept uncertainty then the mood state we shift into is one of “Curiosity”.
How we deal with it can lead to a very different internalised state and this can then affect the language we use. The language of Anxiety and the language of Curiosity are very different, and language is important because what we say to ourselves and others really matters as it is how we navigate reality.
“I wonder what will happen ….?” is not the same as “I’m scared about what will happen…”, because the latter is rooted in fear and the former in love.
This is why practicing and being coherent matters so much, because when we are coherent, we access the world differently. Coherence is not just about looking calm on the outside. You can sit and read a book and still not be in coherence, because you are reading fast just to get through it. You can look relaxed while your mind is somewhere else entirely. Real coherence means you are still on the inside, not just the outside.
Everyone finds this in a different way. For some people it is movement, like walking without rushing. For others it is something like cooking, where you slow down and put care into what you are making. What matters is not the activity itself. What matters is whether it lets you feel present enough to sit with discomfort instead of rushing past it.
This is the practical side of working through ambiguity. It is not about solving it right away. It is about finding the tempo and then creating the curious mood within yourself that lets you stay with it long enough to understand what it is trying to show you.
Curiosity will always win over anxiety, finding the tempo of life to enable curiosity within ourselves is important because we see the world as we are, not as it is. Curiosity leads to expansion and growth, both are great places from which to explore the world and widen our window of curiosity.