The Secret Power of Ambivalence

The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. (“Whatever inspiration is,” one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”) In a culture… read article