We all know the platitude of success: if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Our ancestors died if they didn’t keep trying. Life was a continual crisis, and the probabilities were not often good in any endeavor. So, then, in such dire straits, such hopelessness, how did they persist — where did their resolve come from?
Resolve comes from experience – not the experience of success but the experience of crisis. It is crisis, and uncertainty, with which we must become familiar, if we want to succeed. But where is crisis?
Probability and possibility — one is predictable, while the other is not; one represents order and the other chaos. We make a distinction between them, but their difference is just a matter of degree. On the other hand, their extremes are to be avoided like the Scylla and Charybdis. The extreme of probability is certainty, fixity, stagnation and mindless routine; the extreme of possibility is infinity, which is the end of existence. In essence, these two extremes are one and the same, a state of being where nothing happens – a state of non-being. After all, what is life if nothing happens?
The economist John Maynard Keynes felt that that we cannot predict the future with any certainty. There are too many unknowns capable of controverting the best laid plans. Therefore, it is a mistake to treat the world as a place of probabilities and risks. We must, on the other hand, focus on uncertainty. Uncertainty lies in the in-between, where probabilities fall apart and where new laws spontaneously generate out of the chaos of possibility.
Yes, here lies crisis. People who think in crisis mode see with a sort of magical realism; the would-be’s and could-be’s of possibility are not unexpected when they occur.
Only people who live under the safe protection of the bell-curve find the impossible surprising. Certainly, there is a type of success that can be achieved from playing it safe. Follow the herd. But don’t forget how the herd tramples the landscape. That is the danger of monolithic traditions and mindless routines. Their very inflexibility ultimately does them in.
Crisis is not always extreme, but the response to it is always to be found in ritualing (conscious ritualing). For this reason it can never be emphasized enough that ritual should not be confused with routine. In routine lies death and stagnation. If we are to be successful, we need to break out of routines.
Conscious ritualers have a facility for controlled spontaneity, which is a sense of balance between probability and possibility. Probability, which is knowledge (or control), allows the ritualer to exploit the possibilities of play. Controlled spontaneity allows us to jump up and down and to scream out loud if we want, in order to scare away the mouse in the house. But instead of being fearful we can be playful — and perhaps to better effect. Thus we can ride confidently into the in-between, into the liminal moment that exists after things have fallen apart and before they have come back to the routine. This is the true dimension of crisis, and it is there that we shall discover the routes to success.