I studied the word for some time, rolling it around on my tongue; tasting it in my thoughts. A fact that something is going to be true. A firm knowledge that an event is going to take place. I dabble in certainty. I work to obtain conditions that clearly and reasonably are or aren’t. Some call this feeling the concrete beneath your toes. Some call this walking the safe path. It is neither of these things for me, because I find certainty to be clearing at the end of the path. It is the path itself that is difficult to see.
How do I get there? It is a question that pops into existence with every iteration of want. When I was a kid I knew beyond doubt that I would have six kids I’d be looking after. The number was right on my tongue but it wasn’t at all what I wanted. I wanted seven. I knew even then that seven would be perfect and would not be. Now I find myself in a situation where the path to my happiness means six kids. Always has. This is certain.
When I was a kid my grandmother told me that I was going to teach. I utterly refuted her claim. She’d worked for the NY board of education and loved her administrative job. Her daughter wound up being a teacher. In my mind I wasn’t meant for that place or that path. In that moment I knew two things: I knew I wasn’t meant to teach elementary school and I knew I wasn’t meant to spend the bulk of my life as a New Yorker. I was certain of these things, though I wanted very badly to be a New Yorker. One day after I was done with college and working as a youth coach in Iowa, a professor of mine came up to me after a practice and basically handed me paperwork for graduate school. I signed up. A month and a half later I was teaching my first class. I never even signed up to be a teacher, but here I was in this place I was certain to end up.
It was in those formative college years that I truly recognized that certainty didn’t necessarily work alone. It curled itself around another factor that at times also existed outside of my conscious awareness. That one was the hardest to recognize.