Keats’s use of negative capability was primarily about art, but it was later adopted by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who gave it a more psychological and existential slant. For Bion, negative capability was about being able to think intuitively, outside of memory and desire. “Discard your memory,” he implored. “Discard the future tense of your desire; forget . . . both what you knew and what you want, to leave space for a new idea.”
A new idea.
I love that. It’s like the Zen Buddhist concept of satori, of enlightenment through submission, something reached through a quest into the uncertainties of our own nature. That is where freedom lives. In the possibility of a new way of thinking. And it is easier to get there if we keep open and ambiguous and alert to the fluidity of the moment.
Maybe we only exist because of some cosmic negative capability that conjured the universe into being out of the void.
It is okay not to know everything. It might be better and wiser not to know everything, or at least to avoid thinking we know everything, because then we are freer from habitual thinking. But sure, it takes a vulnerability to enter a place of total openness, and maybe a new and deeper understanding of comfort.
I always remember once, years ago, doing a workout video where the instructor bellowed an order, midway through a static squat, to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable.” Now, it may be a bit of a reach to equate advice offered in a workout to negative capability and Zen Buddhism, but I feel we reach a higher kind of comfort, a closer union with who we actually are, when we are willing to move out of safe and known patterns toward—to be Keatsian about it—the unknowing beauty of life.
As Wilfred Bion put it, “Beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable.”
We don’t have to work everything out. We can just witness the beauty.
Why break when you can bend?
You don’t have to cope with everything. You don’t have to handle everything. You don’t have to keep a lid on every-thing to get through a day.
You can’t turn tides. You can’t defy gravity. You can’t go against the grain without getting splinters.
But you can drop the disguise. You can feel what you feel. You can stretch out inside yourself.
You can cry. You can feel. You can show what you are.
You can, in fact, be you.
We have more in common than we think
It is easy to hate everyone these days. It’s easy to go on the internet or switch on the news and feel despair. It’s easy to find reasons to be angry. We have social media apps whose very business model depends on our ongoing capacity for fury and frustration.
It’s easy to be surrounded so entirely by a single view that almost anyone without that view becomes alien.
But.
We can look at the world through more than one lens. If we look at people through the lens of emotion, at the feelings that drive opinions, rather than the opinions themselves, it’s easy to see the things we share. The hopes, the fears, the loves, the insecurities, the longings, the doubts, the dreams.
Other people can be wrong, and we can be wrong, and that is another thing we have in common.
The capacity for fucking up. And for forgiving.
Forgiveness
Forgiving other people is great practice for forgiving yourself when the time comes.
A note on introversion
Introversion is not something you fix via extroversion. You fix it by seeing it as something not to be fixed. Let introversion exist. Allow journeys inward as well as outward.
Resting is doing
You don’t need to be busy. You don’t need to justify your existence in terms of productivity. Rest is an essential part of survival. An essential part of us. An essential part of being the animals we are. When a dog lies in the sun I imagine it does it without guilt, because as far as I can tell dogs seem more in tune with their own needs. As I grow older, I think that resting might actually be the main point of life. To sit down passively, inside or outside, and merely absorb things—the tick of a clock, a cloud passing by, the distant hum of traffic, a bird singing—can feel like an end in itself. It can actually feel and be more meaningful than a lot of the stuff we are conditioned to see as productive. Just as we need pauses between notes for music to sound good, and just as we need punctuation in a sentence for it to be coherent, we should see rest and reflection and passivity—and even sitting on the sofa—as an intrinsic and essential part of life that is needed for the whole to make sense.
Mystery
Think of the works of art that stand the test of time, from the Mona Lisa to Middlemarch. There is always something unsolvable about them. Something critics can debate passionately centuries later with no final certainty. Maybe the art of living is like that too. Maybe the purpose is the mystery, not beyond it. Maybe we aren’t meant to know everything about our lives. And maybe that’s perfectly okay.
The comfort of uncertainty
Uncertainty feeds our anxiety. Uncertainty and anxiety are intrinsically linked. The more anxious we are, the harder we will find tolerating uncertainty. We might write lists, avoid delegating. We might seek constant reassurance. We might double check that we locked the door, or repeatedly want to call someone to check they are okay. We might find ourselves clasping control and unwilling to trust others. We might want to retreat from an anxious world and stay indoors and procrastinate. We might want to escape it altogether by losing ourselves in a world of distraction. We might fill every second of our day with busy activities, with work, with pleasure, with our other addictions.
Of course, none of these things address the root problem. Uncertainty still remains. The only way, ultimately, to deal with uncertainty is to accept uncertainty. Because we can’t escape it. However we choose to timetable our days and our calendars, uncertainty still remains. This is a stubbornly uncertain world, and we have to deal with that.
And one way to deal with it is to see the value in uncertainty. Far from being a curse, uncertainty can be a source of hope. Okay, so yes, it means that the things we are looking forward to might not be as good as we want them to be, but it also means that the things we dread might not be as terrible as we imagine.
For instance, how many times have you heard people talk about blessings in disguise? How many times have we heard about someone who has been afflicted with a terrible misfortune—an illness, a redundancy, a bankruptcy, whatever—then ends up feeling thankful for it, or at least for some aspect of it?
The moments of deepest pain in my life were also the moments I learned the most about myself. Just as some of the things we look forward to aren’t as good as we planned—like a disastrous vacation or a nightmare job that sounded good on paper, a marriage that turned sour—so it is true that many of the hard things in life arrive with lessons or silver linings or a welcome new perspective or reasons to be grateful.