… a witch named brandee gave to me,

The Gift of Ambiguity

As you may have pieced together by the name of the website, I am a big fan of Ambiguity. It’s the main facet of my personal philosophy, most things have more than one way to understand them. 

I know that sounds kind of obvious at first, but there’s more to it than you think. We humans love to categorize things. It creates shortcuts for us to use and it’s a genuine need in our path to understanding. The problem comes in when we take categorizing to an extreme and eliminate details so they fit better in our categories. 

We want to take something like our Astrology sign and use it to explain everything about ourselves, only to learn that you’ve only scratched the surface of your Sun sign. What about your rising sign? What house? What degree? And the process continues. You certainly do find more about yourself through the process, but what was supposed to create a shortcut created a false understanding instead. If I go back to only looking at my Sun sign, after learning more nuance about Astrology, it doesn’t make as much sense to only use one sign. The nuance is where the actual understanding lies. We find the truth of what we are like through the process of categorizing, rather than the category itself.

The same loss of nuance happens with larger-scale concepts, like good and evil. There is comfort in accepting good and evil as absolutes. Most of us in those terms would likely fall in the “good” category. Even if you are not a good person, you can likely find someone worse than you. “They are evil, I am trying my best, so I’m good.” It’s easier to write off things we don’t understand as evil too. If you write off someone who ended up in prison as “evil” you don’t have to question much. If you accept the ambiguity and nuance of the whole person in front of you though, you have to deal with the circumstances that led them to trouble. The process of diving into the person and their story will likely reveal ways they are “good”. The truth is more complicated than the categories.

My favorite philosopher Simone de Beauvoir sums it up best, “Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.” She concludes that we’re going to deal with the complicated middle mess anyway, we may as well accept it. Rather than relying solely on our categories for understanding, we can start with Ambiguity. Rather than trying to figure out if we are right or wrong, we can approach ourselves as full and complete people with both strengths and flaws. There’s no need to condemn yourself and there’s no need to think of yourself as a saint and savior. The point is that you are in-between. Accepting that middle ground, the Ambiguity, as fact allows those complexities to remain true.