Delicious Ambiguity
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity. — Gilda Radner
Gilda Radner said this near the end of her life, while living with ovarian cancer. Which gives the words a weight they might not otherwise carry.
She wasn’t talking about being okay with uncertainty in a casual, things-will-work-out kind of way. She was talking about genuinely not knowing how things were going to go — and finding a way to be with that, rather than constantly fighting against it.
Delicious ambiguity. Two words that don’t obviously belong together. And yet somehow, together, they capture something true.
The story we want
Most of us, if we’re honest, want the story to make sense.
We want the pieces to fit together. We want to be able to look at what’s happened and trace a clear line — this led to that, that led to this, and here’s what it means. We want the difficult chapters to be obviously worth it in retrospect. We want the ending to justify the middle.
And when life doesn’t cooperate — when things happen that don’t fit the narrative, when the timeline doesn’t go the way we planned, when we find ourselves somewhere we didn’t choose and can’t quite see the point of — it’s deeply uncomfortable.
Not just sad or frustrating. Uncomfortable in a particular way. Like something is wrong that needs to be fixed. Like if we could just figure out the meaning, or find the right frame, or get to the next chapter, we could finally relax.
What anxiety has to do with this
A lot of anxiety is, at its core, an attempt to resolve uncertainty before it’s resolved.
The mind scans forward, trying to figure out how things are going to go. It runs scenarios. It prepares for outcomes. It tries to get ahead of what might happen so that when it does happen there will be less surprise, less vulnerability, less exposure to the feeling of not knowing.
It makes sense as a strategy. It also doesn’t really work. Because the uncertainty doesn’t actually go away — we just exhaust ourselves trying to manage it.
What Radner is pointing at is something different. Not the resolution of uncertainty, but a different relationship with it. Not knowing what’s going to happen next — and finding that okay. Even, at times, finding it interesting.
That’s a significant shift. And it’s not one that happens through thinking harder.
The cost of needing the story to make sense
When we’re very attached to things making sense — to the narrative being coherent — we tend to resist what doesn’t fit.
The relationship that ended before it was supposed to. The career that didn’t go the way we planned. The version of ourselves we thought we’d be by now that we clearly aren’t. The loss that doesn’t have a lesson we can point to.
We can spend a lot of energy trying to make these things fit a story that makes sense. Trying to find the meaning. Trying to frame them in a way that makes them okay. And sometimes that works — sometimes the meaning does emerge, sometimes the story does become coherent in retrospect.
But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes things just happened. And the attempt to force them into a tidy narrative keeps us stuck in the story rather than in the actual present moment where our life is.
Not knowing as something to live inside
There’s a phrase in Zen practice — don’t-know mind — that points at something similar to what Radner is describing.
The idea is that certainty closes things down. When we think we know how something is going to go, we stop being genuinely present to how it’s actually going. We stop being curious. We stop being open to being surprised.
Not knowing, by contrast, keeps things alive. It means the next moment is genuinely unknown. It means things could go in directions we haven’t anticipated. It means something is still possible that we haven’t imagined yet.
That’s uncomfortable. It’s also where most of the interesting things in life happen.
Delicious
The word that gets me is delicious.
Not tolerable ambiguity. Not managed ambiguity. Not ambiguity I’ve learned to live with despite everything.
Delicious.
There’s something almost mischievous about it. Like she found a way to actually enjoy the not-knowing. To taste it rather than just endure it. To be genuinely curious about what comes next rather than terrified of it.
I don’t think that’s naive or easy. Coming from someone who was seriously ill, it’s the opposite of naive. It’s hard-won. It’s what’s on the other side of a lot of grief about the story not going the way you wanted it to.
But it’s also genuinely available. Not as a constant state — that would be unrealistic — but as a way of being in certain moments. A brief loosening of the grip. A small opening toward what’s actually here rather than what was supposed to be here.
Something to sit with
Is there an area of your life right now where you’re working hard to make the story make sense — to find the meaning, resolve the uncertainty, get to the part where you know how it turns out?
What would it feel like — just for a moment — to put that down? Not to give up on caring about how things go. Just to loosen the grip slightly. To be here, in the not-knowing, without immediately needing to resolve it.
Not always. Just sometimes. Just enough to remember that the not-knowing is also where you are alive.
If uncertainty and the need to have things make sense is something that shows up strongly for you — particularly if it drives anxiety or makes it hard to be present — that’s often worth exploring in counselling. It’s available in Squamish and online across BC. And if relationships and the messiness of not knowing where things are going is part of what’s hard, relationship counselling can be a useful space for that too.
