Full Transcript for When Certainty Drifts | Ken Woodward #101

your phone when it needed a strong signal to trust your location. 70 00:04:36.889 --> 00:04:38.729 So, I know what a fix is. 71 00:04:39.629 --> 00:04:42.610 I know the relief when it lands close to the plot. 72 00:04:43.419 --> 00:04:48.946 And I know the quiet temptation to put it off because the estimate felt close enough, felt fine. 73 00:04:49.908 --> 00:04:52.411 That tension is where today's question comes from. 74 00:04:53.693 --> 00:04:56.556 Is certainty what actually keeps me safe? 75 00:04:57.778 --> 00:05:01.443 Or is it my ability to keep checking my position against the world? 76 00:05:03.447 --> 00:05:05.808 This is a solo episode and a personal one. 77 00:05:06.529 --> 00:05:09.310 I don't come to the question as someone who has it figured out. 78 00:05:09.850 --> 00:05:19.435 I come to it as someone who lived a long stretch of life on dead reckoning, felt completely safe doing it, and found out later how far the plot had drifted. 79 00:05:20.656 --> 00:05:22.077 I'm gonna take this in three parts. 80 00:05:22.457 --> 00:05:25.939 First, I wanna give certainty it's due because it has earned some. 81 00:05:26.899 --> 00:05:31.322 Second, I want to look at how certainty gets sold in the years I bought it. 82 00:05:32.272 --> 00:05:34.093 Third, I want to talk about the fix. 83 00:05:34.874 --> 00:05:41.157 What it takes to come up, get a real read on where I stand, and live with the exposure that comes with it. 84 00:05:42.958 --> 00:05:45.060 So let me start by defending certainty. 85 00:05:46.120 --> 00:05:48.342 A child needs to know dinner is coming. 86 00:05:49.201 --> 00:05:52.602 Someone needs to be at the curb after school every day the same way. 87 00:05:53.342 --> 00:05:54.982 That predictability is a floor. 88 00:05:55.583 --> 00:05:58.683 From that floor, a kid can go out and poke at the world. 89 00:05:59.784 --> 00:06:03.925 On a boat, through our procedures, nobody debates in the middle of a casualty. 90 00:06:04.665 --> 00:06:05.025 Fire? 91 00:06:05.285 --> 00:06:05.685 Flooding? 92 00:06:06.465 --> 00:06:07.466 Nobody calls a meeting. 93 00:06:08.106 --> 00:06:10.866 The crew executes what they have drilled in training. 94 00:06:11.687 --> 00:06:12.927 That certainty is earned. 95 00:06:13.889 --> 00:06:22.012 Someone thought hard about it ahead of time, tested it, wrote it down, so that in the worst moment, nobody has to think from scratch. 96 00:06:23.673 --> 00:06:26.274 So certainty is a component of safety. 97 00:06:27.214 --> 00:06:28.695 I'm not here to take a hammer to it. 98 00:06:29.295 --> 00:06:34.037 A life with no settled ground would be exhausting, probably dangerous too. 99 00:06:35.498 --> 00:06:37.939 But look at where that good certainty comes from. 100 00:06:39.094 --> 00:06:44.218 The drilled procedure on laminated paper came out of assessment and practice. 101 00:06:45.319 --> 00:06:46.359 Somebody took a fix. 102 00:06:47.620 --> 00:06:50.702 The child's routine is kept by adults who are paying attention. 103 00:06:51.783 --> 00:06:58.228 In both cases, the certainty rests on something underneath it, and someone keeps checking that something. 104 00:06:59.589 --> 00:07:04.953 The trouble starts when certainty stops resting on anything, when it floats free. 105 00:07:05.959 --> 00:07:12.445 when I hold onto it because of how it makes me feel, and I can no longer tell you where it came from. 106 00:07:13.906 --> 00:07:20.832 Social psychologist Ari Kroglansky has spent decades studying what he calls the need for cognitive closure. 107 00:07:21.813 --> 00:07:28.718 It's the desire for a firm answer, almost any firm answer, over the discomfort of not knowing. 108 00:07:29.939 --> 00:07:31.060 Everyone carries some of it. 109 00:07:31.541 --> 00:07:32.702 Some of us carry a lot. 110 00:07:33.800 --> 00:07:39.065 Kroglansky and his colleagues described two things the mind does when the need runs high. 111 00:07:39.885 --> 00:07:41.107 The first is seizing. 112 00:07:41.967 --> 00:07:44.109 I grab the earliest answer that shows up. 113 00:07:45.030 --> 00:07:46.732 The second is freezing. 114 00:07:47.332 --> 00:07:51.596 Once I have it, I hold on and stop taking in new information. 115 00:07:52.557 --> 00:07:54.158 Seize, then freeze. 116 00:07:55.700 --> 00:07:58.762 What was interesting is what cranks the need up. 117 00:07:59.715 --> 00:08:02.576 In their research, time pressure raised it. 118 00:08:03.296 --> 00:08:04.036 So did noise. 119 00:08:04.696 --> 00:08:05.636 So did fatigue. 120 00:08:06.956 --> 00:08:09.897 So, time pressure, noise, and fatigue. 121 00:08:10.957 --> 00:08:13.418 That's a pretty fair description of a late Wednesday. 122 00:08:14.578 --> 00:08:16.918 It's a fair description of most news cycles, too. 123 00:08:17.879 --> 00:08:20.979 And I don't think it's much of a stretch to add fear to that list. 124 00:08:21.839 --> 00:08:25.800 When I'm afraid, I want the ambiguity gone yesterday. 125 00:08:26.700 --> 00:08:29.321 I'll take the first answer that promises to end the feeling. 126 00:08:30.995 --> 00:08:33.857 I watched this happen on the street more times than I can count. 127 00:08:34.717 --> 00:08:40.300 On President's Day in 2022, a white couple slowed their car next to me and my sign. 128 00:08:41.060 --> 00:08:44.122 The first thing out of the window was, are you a communist? 129 00:08:45.063 --> 00:08:45.563 We talked. 130 00:08:46.223 --> 00:08:48.344 They were strongly opposed to critical race theory. 131 00:08:49.125 --> 00:08:52.106 When I asked what that was, they couldn't tell me. 132 00:08:53.247 --> 00:08:55.368 They were fascinated with proving me wrong. 133 00:08:56.149 --> 00:08:58.130 And they were completely sure. 134 00:08:59.308 --> 00:09:00.848 the certainty had arrived. 135 00:09:01.889 --> 00:09:05.149 The thing it was supposed to be about never had. 136 00:09:06.670 --> 00:09:08.370 I don't tell that story to poke fun at them. 137 00:09:09.070 --> 00:09:12.091 Eight years

earlier, I could have been riding in that passenger seat. 138 00:09:14.411 --> 00:09:15.532 Fear is cheap. 139 00:09:16.492 --> 00:09:19.612 It costs almost nothing to deploy and it pays well. 140 00:09:21.153 --> 00:09:22.893 The pattern is old and simple. 141 00:09:23.453 --> 00:09:26.494 First, name the threat, make it vivid, 142 00:09:27.401 --> 00:09:28.182 It might be real. 143 00:09:28.722 --> 00:09:29.622 It might be inflated. 144 00:09:30.543 --> 00:09:33.525 It might not have existed until someone described it. 145 00:09:35.126 --> 00:09:38.068 Second, present yourself as the rescue. 146 00:09:39.149 --> 00:09:40.609 Third, set the price. 147 00:09:41.630 --> 00:09:44.052 The price is rarely money up front. 148 00:09:44.872 --> 00:09:45.533 It's loyalty. 149 00:09:46.273 --> 00:09:46.813 It's trust. 150 00:09:47.754 --> 00:09:52.297 It's my willingness to stop asking questions and let someone else handle it. 151 00:09:53.727 --> 00:09:56.570 People sometimes call that the fox guarding the hen house. 152 00:09:57.330 --> 00:09:59.633 I think it's closer to a protection racket. 153 00:10:00.513 --> 00:10:02.776 The fox takes advantage of a situation. 154 00:10:03.556 --> 00:10:07.881 The racket builds the situation and then sells the fix for it. 155 00:10:09.322 --> 00:10:12.625 One of my favorite examples has nothing to do with politics or religion. 156 00:10:13.446 --> 00:10:18.711 In the 1920s, the company behind Listerine had a product in search of a problem. 157 00:10:19.923 --> 00:10:23.544 Listerine had been sold as an antiseptic for all kinds of uses. 158 00:10:24.465 --> 00:10:33.128 The company picked up an obscure, clinical-sounding word, halitosis, and built a wave of advertising around it. 159 00:10:34.088 --> 00:10:37.069 Bad breath became a hidden social catastrophe. 160 00:10:38.069 --> 00:10:43.611 One ad told the story of a young woman who was often a bridesmaid, but never a bride. 161 00:10:44.411 --> 00:10:45.592 And nobody would tell her why. 162 00:10:46.637 --> 00:10:51.518 The fear was manufactured, and the cure was sitting right there on the shelf. 163 00:10:53.599 --> 00:10:57.620 Now, take that same machine and aim it at bigger things. 164 00:10:58.720 --> 00:11:06.422 A candidate tells me who is coming for my job, my family, my country, and then tells me he's the only one who can stop them. 165 00:11:07.782 --> 00:11:12.843 A preacher tells me about a fire I didn't know was waiting for me, and then points to the only door out. 166 00:11:14.092 --> 00:11:19.254 Commerce, politics, the pulpit, different costumes, same mechanism. 167 00:11:20.535 --> 00:11:23.796 Now, I want to be careful here because not every warning is a racket. 168 00:11:24.476 --> 00:11:28.918 Some threats are real, and the person pointing at them may save my life. 169 00:11:30.439 --> 00:11:38.922 On a boat, when someone calls out a casualty, nobody stops to ask who benefits, so I'm not arguing for distrusting every alarm. 170 00:11:39.522 --> 00:11:43.624 That would just be a different flavor of cheap certainty, the cynics flavor. 171 00:11:44.555 --> 00:11:48.657 It feels sharp and it takes about as much effort as believing everything. 172 00:11:50.438 --> 00:11:55.321 What I am arguing is that I need to know what my certainty rests upon. 173 00:11:56.261 --> 00:11:58.282 And for a long time, I didn't. 174 00:11:59.863 --> 00:12:04.225 I've talked on the podcast about my faith and my politics and how both have changed. 175 00:12:04.986 --> 00:12:12.870 I wanted to come at that from a different angle this time because it's the clearest example I have of certainty that felt exactly like safety. 176 00:12:14.417 --> 00:12:17.479 For years, I found enormous certainty in a particular story. 177 00:12:18.220 --> 00:12:19.241 It went something like this. 178 00:12:20.141 --> 00:12:21.202 There's a moral majority. 179 00:12:21.803 --> 00:12:23.304 We are God's chosen people. 180 00:12:24.004 --> 00:12:27.267 We're going to make America great, all to his glory. 181 00:12:29.148 --> 00:12:30.890 That story did a lot of work for me. 182 00:12:31.730 --> 00:12:33.051 It told me who the good guys were. 183 00:12:33.752 --> 00:12:35.013 It told me where the threats were. 184 00:12:35.894 --> 00:12:36.854 It told me how to vote. 185 00:12:37.755 --> 00:12:43.760 From 1988 through 2016, I voted a straight Republican ticket, no questions asked. 186 00:12:44.562 --> 00:12:45.682 I didn't agonize over it. 187 00:12:46.183 --> 00:12:46.923 I didn't need to. 188 00:12:47.623 --> 00:12:49.244 The answers came pre-assembled. 189 00:12:51.205 --> 00:12:52.685 This is the part I've had to face. 190 00:12:53.586 --> 00:12:56.987 That certainty stripped me of the responsibility to ask questions. 191 00:12:58.108 --> 00:13:01.509 It let me skip the nuanced gray between black and white. 192 00:13:02.550 --> 00:13:07.972 I handed my critical thinking to other people and let them make my decisions for me. 193 00:13:09.025 --> 00:13:14.890 Then when the results came in, good or bad, I could point at them and say, well, that's God's will. 194 00:13:16.591 --> 00:13:17.952 Think about how tidy that is. 195 00:13:18.552 --> 00:13:21.655 If the outcome is God's will, I have no stake in it. 196 00:13:22.255 --> 00:13:23.516 I'm not responsible for it. 197 00:13:24.117 --> 00:13:25.758 I'm absolved before I ever begin. 198 00:13:26.919 --> 00:13:28.420 That isn't faith doing its work. 199 00:13:29.121 --> 00:13:33.384 That's certainty doing a very convincing impression of faith. 200 00:13:35.286 --> 00:13:38.008 For most of my life, I thought I was one of the good guys. 201 00:13:39.116 --> 00:13:40.237 I struggle with that word now. 202 00:13:40.477 --> 00:13:42.599 The word good was part of the package. 203 00:13:43.240 --> 00:13:46.683 It was the reassurance that made the whole thing so comfortable to carry. 204 00:13:48.164 --> 00:13:49.665 When did the plot finally get checked? 205 00:13:50.286 --> 00:13:52.388

For me, there wasn't one clean moment. 206 00:13:52.868 --> 00:13:54.830 There was a long, slow run of bearings. 207 00:13:55.931 --> 00:13:59.994 The biggest one came in May of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered. 208 00:14:00.935 --> 00:14:06.320 I was shocked and grieved and angry, and clicking a sad face emoji didn't come close to what I felt. 209 00:14:07.523 --> 00:14:09.064 Six days later, I started walking. 210 00:14:10.025 --> 00:14:18.572 On one of those walks, a man named AJ, standing on a tree-lined sidewalk in his own neighborhood, asked me why it took until George Floyd's murder to wake me up. 211 00:14:19.854 --> 00:14:20.814 I didn't have a good answer. 212 00:14:21.715 --> 00:14:27.360 The honest one was that I had lived my whole life in a world that rarely asked me to deal with racism. 213 00:14:28.201 --> 00:14:28.701 So I didn't. 214 00:14:30.302 --> 00:14:35.327 I wrote in one of my posts that I had spent more than 47 years comfortably oblivious. 215 00:14:36.620 --> 00:14:41.882 Five years before one of those walks, I had questioned why we even needed Black History Month. 216 00:14:42.682 --> 00:14:43.542 I'm not proud of that. 217 00:14:44.342 --> 00:14:48.524 I say it because it shows how steady the old plot felt from the inside. 218 00:14:49.424 --> 00:14:50.304 I wasn't anxious. 219 00:14:50.884 --> 00:14:51.685 I wasn't searching. 220 00:14:52.485 --> 00:14:56.826 I was certain, and I was sure that certainty meant that I was fine. 221 00:14:58.647 --> 00:15:01.448 Reflecting on that abdication has been brutal. 222 00:15:02.388 --> 00:15:03.328 I ate of that apple. 223 00:15:04.169 --> 00:15:05.689 It tasted like safety. 224 00:15:08.030 --> 00:15:10.031 Coming up from all that cost me the certainty. 225 00:15:10.971 --> 00:15:12.552 It had also handed something back. 226 00:15:13.572 --> 00:15:15.453 My fingerprints are on the outcomes again. 227 00:15:16.273 --> 00:15:16.933 I have a stake. 228 00:15:17.794 --> 00:15:22.735 I get to be responsible, and I've come to see that as a kind of dignity rather than a burden. 229 00:15:24.156 --> 00:15:29.898 Now, I'd be misleading you, though, if I said that I came up once and have been navigating by fixes ever since. 230 00:15:31.324 --> 00:15:33.125 A while back, I sat down with a good friend. 231 00:15:33.525 --> 00:15:36.946 She told me about a conversation she had had with an anti-racism expert. 232 00:15:37.687 --> 00:15:42.749 This expert, she said, had drawn conclusions and made comments rooted in bias and stereotypes. 233 00:15:43.529 --> 00:15:43.989 I nodded. 234 00:15:44.649 --> 00:15:45.590 I acted shocked. 235 00:15:46.410 --> 00:15:48.851 The truth was, I didn't hear what was wrong. 236 00:15:49.511 --> 00:15:50.132 Couldn't see it. 237 00:15:51.132 --> 00:15:53.813 But I wanted to look like someone who could, so I faked it. 238 00:15:54.974 --> 00:15:56.975 On the drive home, it landed on me. 239 00:15:57.175 --> 00:16:00.076 I had lied to a friend to protect a

brand new certainty. 240 00:16:01.065 --> 00:16:03.486 The old story had told me I was one of the good guys. 241 00:16:04.486 --> 00:16:07.467 Somewhere along the way, I'd built a new version of that same story. 242 00:16:08.247 --> 00:16:09.848 Now I was the one who gets it. 243 00:16:10.468 --> 00:16:11.628 The one who walked the streets. 244 00:16:12.188 --> 00:16:13.429 The one who understands it. 245 00:16:14.569 --> 00:16:16.610 Same apple, different tree. 246 00:16:18.270 --> 00:16:18.810 We met again. 247 00:16:18.830 --> 00:16:22.351 I asked for her forgiveness for lying, and she graciously granted it. 248 00:16:23.332 --> 00:16:25.172 Then I did what I should have done the first time. 249 00:16:25.412 --> 00:16:27.133 I listened, and I asked questions. 250 00:16:28.797 --> 00:16:35.800 I tell that story because I don't want anyone to hear this episode and conclude the answer is to trade their certainty for mine. 251 00:16:36.741 --> 00:16:38.661 That just changes which fox gets paid. 252 00:16:39.882 --> 00:16:41.883 The racket doesn't care which flag I fly. 253 00:16:42.683 --> 00:16:44.364 It only needs me to stop checking. 254 00:16:46.305 --> 00:16:48.626 So, how do I come up to the surface for a fix? 255 00:16:50.273 --> 00:16:53.015 The walk taught me more about that than anything else in my life. 256 00:16:53.755 --> 00:17:02.220 Over 24 months, walked 2,085 miles every street and alley in Washington, D.C., wearing a big yellow sandwich board that read Black and Brown Lives Matter. 257 00:17:02.960 --> 00:17:07.503 I had over 1,300 conversations with strangers, and I was afraid a lot more than I let on. 258 00:17:09.063 --> 00:17:15.487 People asked about my safety constantly, and their questions told me a lot about where they believed safety came from. 259 00:17:16.908 --> 00:17:22.749 In the summer of 2021, two off-duty police officers were working security on a block I walked through. 260 00:17:23.709 --> 00:17:28.330 One of them looked at me, unarmed, and understood it as an act of faith. 261 00:17:29.311 --> 00:17:31.911 The other one understood what I was doing and why. 262 00:17:32.711 --> 00:17:37.172 He just said he would never do it without a concealed carry permit and a Glock. 263 00:17:38.393 --> 00:17:40.813 Same street, same guy with the same sign. 264 00:17:41.573 --> 00:17:44.714 Two completely different answers about what makes a person safe. 265 00:17:46.793 --> 00:17:52.977 A few months before that, a woman named Michaela called to me from her third-floor window on Hartford Street in Southeast. 266 00:17:54.057 --> 00:17:58.700 She was mystified that I was out there without it, as she would put it, packing. 267 00:17:59.620 --> 00:18:02.362 Then she asked the best safety question I had heard in two years. 268 00:18:03.102 --> 00:18:03.903 What's your plan? 269 00:18:04.563 --> 00:18:07.425 Are you going to fight, talk, run, or what are you going to do? 270 00:18:08.745 --> 00:18:10.246 She wasn't offering me certainty. 271 00:18:10.967 --> 00:18:13.128 She was asking whether I had done an assessment. 272 00:18:14.438 --> 00:18:18.980 Some days, my plan was mostly the ability to talk fast and a good pair of shoes. 273 00:18:20.941 --> 00:18:22.582 I want to tell you about two days. 274 00:18:23.502 --> 00:18:26.283 The first was my walk, number seven, in July of 2020. 275 00:18:26.403 --> 00:18:30.385 It was my longest day of the entire walk, 28 miles. 276 00:18:31.366 --> 00:18:33.406 And by the end of it, I was spent. 277 00:18:34.367 --> 00:18:37.068 Dusk was settling in, heading back toward the car. 278 00:18:37.328 --> 00:18:39.929 I walked right into a group of young black men in their 20s. 279 00:18:40.710 --> 00:18:43.571 Music pumping, a party just getting started. 280 00:18:44.658 --> 00:18:45.138 I stopped. 281 00:18:45.579 --> 00:18:46.019 We talked. 282 00:18:46.739 --> 00:18:50.222 Racism, politics, history, education, what comes next? 283 00:18:51.263 --> 00:18:56.686 A few of them asked me probing questions about what I believed and why I had voted the way I had all those years. 284 00:18:57.947 --> 00:18:59.368 Those were not softball questions. 285 00:19:00.269 --> 00:19:06.993 A couple of them said they genuinely wanted to sit down with a racist just to understand why he was hated. 286 00:19:08.114 --> 00:19:13.578 One of them told me he was just tired of guys like him getting killed and that he had no hope it would change. 287 00:19:15.327 --> 00:19:18.890 Twenty minutes later, I said goodbye and walked to my car in the dark. 288 00:19:19.850 --> 00:19:21.472 A police cruiser rolled past. 289 00:19:22.532 --> 00:19:24.514 I have no idea what the officer was thinking. 290 00:19:25.414 --> 00:19:28.677 But that night, I wrote down this reflection about the guys I had met. 291 00:19:29.958 --> 00:19:35.982 These are the men society tells me to fear, and political fear-mongering ads promise to protect me from. 292 00:19:38.264 --> 00:19:39.985 My life was better for those twenty minutes. 293 00:19:40.846 --> 00:19:41.687 That was a fix. 294 00:19:42.519 --> 00:19:45.101 The plot I'd carried for 50 years said one thing. 295 00:19:45.822 --> 00:19:48.824 The world, when I actually checked, said something else. 296 00:19:50.645 --> 00:19:51.806 Now, the second day. 297 00:19:52.747 --> 00:19:55.409 Walk number 66 in August of 2021. 298 00:19:56.370 --> 00:20:03.195 More than a year and well over a thousand miles later, that was the day I finished every street and alley east of the Anacostia River. 299 00:20:04.095 --> 00:20:04.916 A big milestone. 300 00:20:05.777 --> 00:20:09.760 It was a short walking day, so I drove back to cover a few blocks I'd missed. 301 00:20:10.720 --> 00:20:14.163 I pulled onto a street near Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue to walk an alley. 302 00:20:15.103 --> 00:20:16.845 Several young men were out there grilling. 303 00:20:18.006 --> 00:20:19.066 I didn't get out of the car. 304 00:20:20.648 --> 00:20:22.569 I

wrote that one down honestly, too. 305 00:20:23.490 --> 00:20:25.551 They weren't doing anything that showed danger. 306 00:20:26.512 --> 00:20:28.433 I still refused to stop and walk. 307 00:20:29.154 --> 00:20:29.754 I chickened out. 308 00:20:31.756 --> 00:20:36.039 Later, I had dinner at Busboys and Poets to celebrate finishing east of the river. 309 00:20:36.059 --> 00:20:37.260 66 walks. 310 00:20:37.380 --> 00:20:37.840 66 walks. 311 00:20:38.763 --> 00:20:44.185 Hundreds of conversations that went well, and the old plot still had a hand on the wheel. 312 00:20:45.845 --> 00:20:47.086 That's what dead reckoning does. 313 00:20:47.866 --> 00:20:48.566 It drifts back. 314 00:20:49.506 --> 00:20:50.887 One fix doesn't hold forever. 315 00:20:51.647 --> 00:20:58.389 The currents that push me off course in the first place are still running, and they don't let up because I had a good evening in July. 316 00:20:59.589 --> 00:21:02.430 I also have to be careful not to make all this about my own nerves. 317 00:21:03.431 --> 00:21:07.712 The walk kept reminding me that a lot of people never get to rest on cheap certainty in the first 318 00:21:09.628 --> 00:21:16.371 On my first day walking east of the Anacostia in March of 21, a woman stopped me at the end of the day with a string of hard questions. 319 00:21:16.971 --> 00:21:17.692 Are you racist? 320 00:21:18.192 --> 00:21:19.772 What real difference are you making? 321 00:21:20.393 --> 00:21:25.095 And this one, why is it okay for you to walk our neighborhood when I can't safely walk yours? 322 00:21:26.215 --> 00:21:26.755 She was right. 323 00:21:27.476 --> 00:21:28.576 Didn't have a snappy answer. 324 00:21:30.157 --> 00:21:34.279 A couple of months later, a young man stepped away from a backyard party to talk with me. 325 00:21:35.207 --> 00:21:46.376 He had said that the uncertainty I felt walking up to a crowded sidewalk in a black neighborhood with my big yellow sign was a small glimpse of what he and many others feel walking into a sea of white bodies. 326 00:21:48.218 --> 00:21:52.442 I wrote afterward that survival instincts require sizing up a situation quickly. 327 00:21:53.422 --> 00:21:56.145 For a lot of people, that isn't just a thought experiment. 328 00:21:58.146 --> 00:21:59.568 That one rearranged something in me. 329 00:22:00.317 --> 00:22:02.698 For that young man, assessment is safety. 330 00:22:03.518 --> 00:22:06.019 It isn't optional, and it doesn't get a day off. 331 00:22:07.219 --> 00:22:14.201 My version of safety had leaned on certainty, and I could afford that because the world rarely sent me a bill for being wrong. 332 00:22:15.281 --> 00:22:19.282 His came from reading the room, every room, over and over. 333 00:22:20.582 --> 00:22:21.523 So what actually helps? 334 00:22:22.823 --> 00:22:23.903 Three things have helped me. 335 00:22:25.104 --> 00:22:26.204 The first is the body. 336 00:22:27.365 --> 00:22:32.187 Partway through the walk, I was reading Resmaa Manikim's book, My Grandmother's Hands, which I highly recommend. 337 00:22:32.968 --> 00:22:39.611 He writes about how racialized fear lives in the body and not only in the head, and about learning to settle the nervous system. 338 00:22:41.012 --> 00:22:45.914 I started paying attention to what happened in me as I approached a stranger who didn't look like me. 339 00:22:46.755 --> 00:22:48.495 The tight chest, short breath. 340 00:22:49.476 --> 00:22:53.298 I practiced noticing it and calming it before deciding anything. 341 00:22:54.334 --> 00:23:02.239 When I did, it was easier to settle into conversation because I usually discovered I was rarely in any real danger. 342 00:23:04.020 --> 00:23:08.062 This matters because the need for closure gets loud under stress. 343 00:23:09.043 --> 00:23:13.165 If I can regulate my own body, I can buy myself room to assess. 344 00:23:14.066 --> 00:23:16.867 I don't have to seize the first answer that shows up. 345 00:23:18.788 --> 00:23:20.810 The second is a short set of questions. 346 00:23:21.655 --> 00:23:26.719 When someone hands me a threat, along with a rescue, I try to ask three things. 347 00:23:27.880 --> 00:23:29.321 Who benefits if I believe this? 348 00:23:30.382 --> 00:23:31.743 Can I check any of it myself? 349 00:23:32.864 --> 00:23:36.127 Does the rescue require me to stop asking questions? 350 00:23:37.648 --> 00:23:39.810 That last one is the giveaway. 351 00:23:40.931 --> 00:23:43.113 A legitimate warning survives scrutiny. 352 00:23:44.054 --> 00:23:46.095 A good navigator wants the plot checked. 353 00:23:47.036 --> 00:23:49.298 A racket needs me to stop looking. 354 00:23:51.355 --> 00:23:53.477 The third is a phrase from a poet. 355 00:23:54.597 --> 00:24:01.563 In December of 1817, John Keats wrote a letter to his brothers describing something he called negative capability. 356 00:24:02.623 --> 00:24:11.110 He meant the capacity to be in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. 357 00:24:12.431 --> 00:24:13.311 Irritable reaching. 358 00:24:14.432 --> 00:24:16.694 That describes me more often than I'd like. 359 00:24:17.680 --> 00:24:24.886 The itch to settle it, to be done, to have an answer, even a poor one, as long as the discomfort goes away. 360 00:24:26.768 --> 00:24:28.829 Keats wasn't against knowing things. 361 00:24:29.850 --> 00:24:37.717 Negative capability is the ability to stay in the gap between what I know and what I don't know yet, long enough to actually find out. 362 00:24:39.278 --> 00:24:42.041 Staying there takes a kind of emotional stability. 363 00:24:43.014 --> 00:24:49.540 takes enough security that the not knowing doesn't send me running to whoever offers the quickest exit. 364 00:24:51.502 --> 00:24:54.124 This is the piece that holds the rest together for me. 365 00:24:55.205 --> 00:24:59.949 Questioning my fears and the people who profit from them is necessary. 366 00:25:01.350 --> 00:25:03.052 On its

own, it isn't enough. 367 00:25:03.932 --> 00:25:06.575 It also needs to be steady enough to tolerate what I find. 368 00:25:07.447 --> 00:25:14.111 Otherwise, I'll ask one question, panic at the open space it creates, and grab the nearest certainty on the way out the door. 369 00:25:15.532 --> 00:25:17.233 Fear shrinks that gap. 370 00:25:18.234 --> 00:25:20.656 It makes the unknown feel unbearable. 371 00:25:21.496 --> 00:25:25.899 And a person who can't bear the unknown is very easy to sell to. 372 00:25:27.660 --> 00:25:29.782 There's one more moment from the walk I return to. 373 00:25:30.482 --> 00:25:34.065 In May of 2022, friends joined me for the final mile. 374 00:25:34.872 --> 00:25:38.533 In the cold and the rain, I was exhausted and my heart was full. 375 00:25:39.574 --> 00:25:45.596 The next morning, standing at the sink making breakfast, I had a bit of an anxiety attack. 376 00:25:46.696 --> 00:25:47.677 Imposter syndrome. 377 00:25:48.557 --> 00:25:54.339 My body went tight, and a torrent of thoughts told me I was a fraud and inadequate. 378 00:25:55.520 --> 00:25:56.120 It passed. 379 00:25:56.680 --> 00:25:58.641 For a while, though, it was crippling. 380 00:25:59.721 --> 00:26:01.502 What studied me was the record. 381 00:26:02.442 --> 00:26:03.863 I had written everything down. 382 00:26:04.862 --> 00:26:11.666 Every walk, every conversation, the miles, the names, and even the moments I got wrong. 383 00:26:12.686 --> 00:26:19.470 One of the reasons I kept those notes was so I wouldn't gaslight myself or let anyone else do it for me. 384 00:26:20.571 --> 00:26:22.132 The walks really happened. 385 00:26:22.752 --> 00:26:24.873 The conversations really happened. 386 00:26:25.954 --> 00:26:27.975 Those notes were my fixes. 387 00:26:28.876 --> 00:26:32.998 When fear told me where I was, I could check it against the log. 388 00:26:35.012 --> 00:26:36.833 Now, let me leave a few things with you. 389 00:26:37.754 --> 00:26:42.497 One, certainty is a component of safety, not the whole of it. 390 00:26:43.438 --> 00:26:46.700 The certainty worth keeping rests on something I can check. 391 00:26:47.641 --> 00:26:54.245 If I can't say what mine rests on, that's a good reason to come up to Periscope Depth to ask questions about how I got here. 392 00:26:55.646 --> 00:27:01.230 Two, watch for threat and rescue arriving from the same voice. 393 00:27:02.211 --> 00:27:13.680 When they do, I say, maybe, and I slow down and ask who benefits, whether I can check it, and whether the rescue requires me to stop asking questions. 394 00:27:15.001 --> 00:27:18.344 Three, be wary of certainty that absolves. 395 00:27:19.365 --> 00:27:27.371 If a belief leaves me with no stake in the outcome and no responsibility for what happens, it deserves a second look. 396 00:27:28.312 --> 00:27:29.092 It may be wisdom. 397 00:27:30.113 --> 00:27:31.274 It may also be an exit. 398 00:27:32.890 --> 00:27:33.110 4. 399 00:27:34.211 --> 00:27:36.532 Build the steadiness to stay in the gap. 400 00:27:37.613 --> 00:27:38.333 Settle the body. 401 00:27:39.014 --> 00:27:39.674 Keep a record. 402 00:27:40.595 --> 00:27:43.637 Stay close to people who will tell me when my plot has drifted. 403 00:27:44.778 --> 00:27:46.599 Coming up for a fix means exposure. 404 00:27:47.539 --> 00:27:49.881 The boat that never comes up isn't safer. 405 00:27:50.741 --> 00:27:51.802 It's only more confident. 406 00:27:52.482 --> 00:27:54.704 Right up to the moment, it isn't. 407 00:27:55.544 --> 00:27:56.925 And those are tragic situations. 408 00:27:58.526 --> 00:28:02.489 I open this episode with a question about certainty and the world out there. 409 00:28:03.450 --> 00:28:06.072 I want to close with this version I can only ask of myself. 410 00:28:07.433 --> 00:28:10.575 Is my need for certainty making me safer? 411 00:28:11.676 --> 00:28:12.137 Ken here. 412 00:28:13.618 --> 00:28:17.160 The weekly Substack Curated Questions dispatch is now live. 413 00:28:17.781 --> 00:28:21.604 You can sign up on either Substack or from the Curated Questions homepage. 414 00:28:22.464 --> 00:28:29.309 Additionally, the homepage includes a link to record your right now question, which may be included in an upcoming episode. 415 00:28:30.390 --> 00:28:36.095 If you have found this show provides you value, please hit that subscribe button and leave a comment. 416 00:28:36.935 --> 00:28:43.821 Until I found myself on this side of the microphone, I didn't understand how much of a difference those actions actually do make. 417 00:28:45.458 --> 00:28:46.979 And that wraps up another episode. 418 00:28:47.979 --> 00:28:52.221 Drop in the comments section of your favorite podcast player the moments that will stick with you. 419 00:28:52.962 --> 00:28:55.903 To those on the other side of the speaker, thank you for being here. 420 00:28:56.804 --> 00:29:01.486 Gratitude shout-out to Beauty Pill for the show's music and producer Ben Ford for the technical help. 421 00:29:02.426 --> 00:29:04.968 This episode was recorded on Piscataway land. 422 00:29:05.728 --> 00:29:08.032 Please engage with this episode in some manner. 423 00:29:08.673 --> 00:29:12.660 Download, follow, save, like, share, or comment about something that resonated. 424 00:29:13.361 --> 00:29:16.046 This action ensures we are engaging the questioning community. 425 00:29:16.767 --> 00:29:18.811 Until next time, keep questioning.