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The Daily Attentional
Meditations for a Divided World
Vol. 1, Week 3: Dropping Our Illusions
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“Leave the door open for the unknown… That’s where the most important things come from.” — Rebecca Solnit
The biggest obstacle to progress in uncertain times is certainty.
We live in an age of hot takes where certainty masquerades as strength in public life. Opinions form quickly and harden just as fast. Complexity collapses into slogans. In this environment certainty scaffolds our identity, becoming something to defend rather than examine.
Yet much of our certainty is simply attachment.
The Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte challenges the certainty of our convictions in his 1929 masterpiece, "The Treachery of Images." Beneath the painted image of a pipe appear the words: “This is not a pipe.” The mind resists. Of course it is a pipe, we think. But it is not. It is an image of a pipe.
Magritte reveals the distance between representation and reality. Our ideas, beliefs, and categories are not the world itself. They are approximations—useful, but incomplete. When we forget this, we cling to them as if they were truth.
Polarization thrives where certainty dominates. When people believe they already possess the full truth, others become obstacles or threats. Bridging across difference becomes impossible because curiosity has been replaced by judgment. Over time, certainty exhausts dialogue and fractures shared reality itself.
In her 2005 essay collection, "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit offers an alternative. “Leave the door open for the unknown… That’s where the most important things come from.” There is something better on the other side of our certainty.
Progress is cultivated in humility and the willingness to see without certainty. That means holding our convictions in consideration of others, and discovering what more we can see together.
Certainty narrows our view of what's possible. Uncertainty opens it.
- Rebecca Solnit, "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," 2005.
- René Magritte, "The Treachery of Images," 1929. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
