When I was eight-years-old I was diagnosed with OCD. Some of my symptoms you will be familiar with – I used to wash my hands so much they bled, would get very upset if rules weren’t strictly adhered to (such as staying up later than my assigned bed time of eight o’clock) and would believe that my failure to do or not do certain things would cause terrible calamities to happen. Depictions of OCD in television and film tend to focus upon the most obvious external manifestations of the condition – the parts known as compulsions. Think of the television detective Monk obsessively washing his hands, for instance. However, these external compulsions are – in most cases – just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the suffering is actually hidden away inside the sufferer’s mind. At the root of much of this suffering is, I believe, difficulty coping with the discomfort caused by uncertainty.

An example of this was when, during my second year of university, I was fixated on the belief that I had terminal brain cancer. I had been having bad one-sided headaches and looked this up online. Sites like wrongdiagnosis.com and webmd.com informed me that having headaches on only one side of the head was a very bad sign, indicating some kind of neurological issue, maybe a tumour. Going to the doctor I was informed that, while tension headaches tended to be across the forehead and migraines tended to be felt in both temples, it was highly unlikely to be a brain tumour, but of course they couldn’t be 100%. The headaches continued and I wanted to be sure that it wasn’t anything serious. So, I went back to the doctors. They scheduled me for an MRI scan, which revealed nothing out of the ordinary… but then again, it was an MRI scan without contrast, which the internet usefully informed me was less reliable than one with contrast. Every time my mental goalposts kept changing. It was only when my dentist extracted a wisdom tooth and the pain stopped that I was able to stop worrying and obsessively Googling.

When Jesus instructs his disciples to “[l]ook at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them” and to “[c]onsider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin” (Matthew 6:26-28) it is very easy, I find, to bridle at the suggestion. “All very well…”, we might think… “but I have important duties and responsibilities. It wouldn’t be serious for me to not worry about these things. I’m far more important than a lily or a bird and must stride about the world with constant purpose and certainty”. However, an important distinction here lies. Because worrying about taking action isn’t the same as taking action. Thinking about doing work isn’t the same as doing work. The lines from Matthew here are scary and radical because they ask us to let go, shifting from faith in our individual ego, to faith in the Lord. And, in that faith, to stop with the constant “what ifs”.

Over the last decade I have become marginally better at doing this. Any progress I have made comes down, I believe, to practising meditation and, also, simply getting older and recognising how rarely things seem to go the way you expect. However, ironically, while I think I’ve gotten better at holding ambiguities and not-knowing-ness in suspension, much of Western society seems to have demanded and made claims to greater and greater degrees of certainty. In the so-called culture wars, we are expected to take sides – to know with certainty which statues should be brought down and which deserve to stay; to know with certainty which celebrities deserve to be cancelled and which have the potential to be redeemed; to know with certainty what is good and what is bad.

On one level, this seems justifiable since the stakes seem so very high. With the rising tides of fascism and climate change, uncertainty and inaction look dangerously like choosing the side of complacency or even ignorance and bigotry. None of us want to look stupid or feel like a bigot.

However, it does not necessarily follow that we need to bring certainty to every space and facet of our lives. I suspect that the impulse to do this is symptomatic of how the divisions between online and offline have becomes increasing blurred for many people so that we are always – smartphones in our pockets; Twitter and Facebook notifications set to on – existing as citizens of the internet “in the real world”. And the internet rarely allows for nuance. Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror, has referred to Twitter as an “echo chamber of nodding heads”, in which people perform their outrage to others who always already agree or disagree with them.

I see this tendency towards black and white thinking in my students. Having been “taught to the test” through much of their secondary school and sixth form education, they are very hesitant to offer symbolic readings of films, getting very caught up wanting to know what a film really means, what it’s exact message is – hoping that I can tell them this. However, what they have no hesitancy about is declaring that a film is good or bad and that a character is a good or bad person. Their almost universal love of superhero and Disney films reflects this. The films my students have struggled with the most are narrative films that end on an uncertain or ambiguous conclusion. Especially disliked has been the films of Chilean director Raúl Ruiz, whose films often veer off at wild tangents, characters are written as deliberately inconsistent and changeable, and stories don’t conclude satisfactorily or sometimes at all. It is this ability of art to produce uncertainty rather than traditional empirical knowledge that Keats champions as “negative capability”. While I would never allow my students to quote from the notoriously unreliable and changeable website Wikipedia, the Wikipedia entry on negative capability with its unknown author or authors puts it brilliantly: “Keats might be seen as providing an antidote to E. M. Forster's mantra of 'Only connect...'. Keats might be seen as saying 'Only disconnect...' from our reassuring certainties, from our hyperconnected world, from our executive control, and from our prefrontal cortex”.

When working on this service I received the email from Tessa regarding the General Assembly AGM Motions. I found that with a couple of the motions I didn’t know if I would or should vote for and against. I stewed over this for two days and ended up instigating a pantomime of the kind of internet argument that I’ve been cautioning against here, for which I am truly sorry. It is essential that we do not reduce people to caricatures of their opinions, but instead respect nuance and not-knowing-ness.

It is okay to not know and to sometimes step back and admit this. This is true on small personal matters, on the topic of aesthetic appreciation, but also on a larger scale with matters like climate change. I see more and more “Doomers” online who confidently announce that it is too late to prevent near-time human extinction and even make claims of the exact year in which this is going to occur. This is the flip side of the former certainty that said climate change was not occurring and was all just a made-up fiction. The fact is, the climate is going to get harder for humans to adapt to, but in terms of how hard and how fast, we don’t know for sure. The future is probabilistic, it hasn’t already happened. That is not to say that we should just throw up our hands and say “Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be” in the face of structural injustices to threats to human existence, but to be more like the birds of the field – worry less; intuit and adapt more.

Having OCD, I’m still not very good at this. It plays havoc in my relationship with my nearest and dearest and brings out the ugliest, most fearful parts of my personality. However, generally speaking, I have improved and the thing that has helped me get better at living with uncertainty is getting off social media. Antonia reflected that this poem by Walt Whitman reads as though he just stepped away from social media and the chorus of angrily conflicting opinions that it brings. If Whitman was alive today, I’d like to think he wouldn’t have a Twitter account.