Security is fundamentally about being able to hold and stay in the tension of uncertainty without compulsively resolving it or dispelling it.
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Security is fundamentally about being able to hold and stay in the tension of uncertainty without compulsively resolving it or dispelling it.
To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
Alan Watts • The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
But it’s worse than a mere contradiction– because what we are really doing when we attempt to achieve fixity in the midst of change, Watts argues, is trying to separate ourselves from all that change, trying to enforce a distinction between ourselves and the rest of the world. To seek security is to try to remove yourself from change, and thus from
... See moreOliver Burkeman • The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cant Stand Positive Thinking
Important work looks past the goal of no tension and instead seeks out and balances the varieties of fear that humans manage to invent. These fears often work in conflict with one another—we cause one kind of problem but promise to reduce another
Seth Godin • This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)
It is in the interstices of uncertainty that we encounter the need and find the freedom to forge our identity and our future.
Margaret Heffernan • Uncharted
while it is essential to cultivate safety, certainty is actually something that should be actively avoided. Certainty is actually a rather rigid state in which creativity and agency cannot exist. ‘If we can become less certain, we are more likely to become receptive to other possibilities, other meanings,’ Mason writes.104 The key is to cultivate s
... See moreJon Alexander • Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do children as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is not safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. —Helen Keller
Jack Kornfield • The Wise Heart: Buddhist Psychology for the West
we need to be safe enough to play with being unsafe, secure enough to leap into insecurity.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
A sense of personal security is anomalous, while anxiety is the norm. To manage this anxiety, individuals have been advised not only to work longer and harder but also to invest in themselves, manage themselves, and continuously improve themselves.