Ambiguity is a reality of life

Ambiguity: the quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness.

As I sit to the task of writing today the subject of ambiguity loomes foremost in my mind. You see there was a time in my life when I was constantly thrown from one extreme emotion to the next. I was always looking for justification for the extreme feelings I was experiencing. Luckily I was blessed to have found Jim Miller, an extraordinary therapist who had been trained by the great Alexander Lowen who in tern had been trained by the legendary Wilhelm Riech. Jim had a unique understanding and insight into the spiritual nature of our emotional lives. He taught me to feel my feelings but do nothing in response. As Jim said to me "your task, your disapline is to let your feeling come and go, and do nothing". This disapline was to teach me to observe my feelings and to grow a tolerance for the situations or actions of others that triggered emotional reactions in me. Jim went on to say that ambiguity is a concept or perspective that is not well understood in our culture and that people are not equipped to handle or tolerate the feelings associated with it. As a result there is a level of drama that is being generated by people as they seek to judge situations as good or bad.

Learning to tolerate ambiguity requires a discipline of inaction that enables us to bear witness to the many changes and processes that make up the bulk of our life experience. 

Alternatively , it is also clear to me that in order to move through the world with any kind of potency we have developed the ability to identify things of importance and then decide what steps we need or want to take accordingly. Once we know something has value to us we usually give it a name. Naming a thing is one of the great powers we have as human beings since once we name a thing we are able to focus and learn, change, control or manipulate it to what ever end we choose. But the act of naming can also be a great weakness or flaw in our makeup. For if we name a thing as say bad, simply because we don't understand it, then we are lost in a self generated illusion of polar good or bad absolutes. 

This is where learning to tolerate ambiguity, the lack of observable absolutes, becomes a practical discipline that can give us the internal room to simply allow processes of change to play themselves out, without our interference. This discipline of tolerance then becomes a powerful tool for us to learn from simple observation and understand our place in relationship to what unfolds, not as a person of action but rather as person of inaction capable of pause, respect and restraint, a person able to hold (or tolerate) ambiguity rather than succumbing to a default position grounded in our perception of the opposites. 

The play of good and bad no longer holds a dominant position and influence in our mind but gives way to allow for the development of more subtle qualities and skills that can become part our personal makeup, i.e. patience, consideration, curiosity and the appreciation and attraction to those things that are deferent from what we believe to be true.