The Consequences of Certainty

Here was where it began; there are echoes and memories here. The trees themselves seem to stand as mute witnesses to those times. The ground seems to hold memories within its every undulation.

It is easy to be brave when you are young. Youth breeds certainty. Back then we knew we were right and the cause we fought for was just.

Nowadays, though, those of us that are left, those of us who have had to learn to live with the harsh consequences of our certainty are not so sure.

There are some, older now, but perhaps no wiser, who hide their doubts behind zealotry; who pretend to still feel the passion of our cause; its nobility, still running through their old veins and tired muscles. We, who have learnt only doubt and uncertainty over those intervening years, do not admire those who claim not to have changed. We pity them. They have become old, but they still lie trapped in the mindset that has brought us all nothing but pain.

It is as though their certainty brings comfort and that comfort reinforces the certainty, so that they cannot allow even a single small doubt about their rightness to penetrate, unless the whole edifice should fall. They think they still know, still understand, the truth, but – in fact – they have built these impregnable castles of belief, of ideology, of certainty, against the world and stay huddled inside them, too frightened of the world to ever step outside and confront it.

Those of us, though, who no longer believe those old certainties, now have this whole world to wander in and to wonder where it all went so wrong.