Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

even in those simple yet specific ways I chose to live in my
world and with and around the things in my world, was indeed a
security blanket, knitted out of stability, predictability,
order, and control. It was an exemplification of John Dewey’s
“quest for Certainty,” as I tried to explain it in the chapter
before: humanity’s equally fundamental search for “a certainty
which shall be absolute and unshakeable” (6) and, therein, “a
peace which is assured, an object which is unqualified by risk
and the shadow of fear” (8). Dewey’s “quest” – my quest – was
for a sense of “reality,” a sense of place and purpose amidst
that “reality,” that was “absolute and unshakeable”; again,
“fixed and immutable.” However, all of this said, I have
learned that, despite your hardest and most earnest efforts with
that “quest,” despite all of your planning and despite your
lists and despite your rigorous systems of organization, life is
simply not so very Certain. The only control and order, the
only Certainty, you can truly have in this world is that which
you convince yourself that you have. It is a lesson that I have
learned; it was a lesson that I have had to learn because of
confronting the uncertainties of life, of the world, of the
universe. I may not love it, let alone even like it, and I may
even at times hate it, with every fiber of my being, but I have
learned to welcome Uncertainty, as you would welcome winter’s
bitter cold winds or briny waves crashing down upon your head.
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