One of the ideas that Brené Brown presents in Daring Greatly is that to avoid being vulnerable one of the things that we do is make the uncertain, certain. I've seen how this is true -- from assigning badness (e.g. "What a jerk!") when the unexpected happens, to filling in the blanks with our own stories (e.g. "She's always late because she's self-centered"), and even more elaborate ways in which we try to "make sense" of our uncertainty.
We try so hard to make sense of it, because sitting with uncertainty -- just sitting with it, not trying to find our way out of it -- is very uncomfortable for most of us. I'm inclined to believe that there are things about our culture that help promote a sense of unease with uncertainty, but no examples come to mind. Certainly though there are evolutionary connections to fear and vigilance in the face of in uncertainty. Fear over whether that rustle in the bush was a fellow tribe member or a predator is what helped keep our ancestors on guard and live long enough to become our ancestors! But since most of us are never in danger of being a predator's lunch, an evolutionary fear or unease with uncertainty doesn't serve us as well as it used to.
To become better at handling uncertainty, I often make it a point to try to just let it be, without thinking up ways to explain it away or analyzing and investigating it into certainty. It's not easy. Sometimes it's frustrating, and sometimes it's emotionally painful, but I like to think that I'm building a better me by challenging myself to acknowledge and simply be with my uncertainty.
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