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It is a great gift to be caused to think.
And to doubt. But I repeat myself.
A good definition of thinking must include doubt. It's step one of our ability to test reality. Life without good reality-testing ability is called schizophrenia!
"Life", in Latin, has the same root as "vitality", and for your life to have any fire and adventure, you need to get out of your safe places. Our need for security is often at odds with our vitality!
As somebody said, a ship is not built for the harbor, but for a different life; traveling on the high seas, whether or not the sea is as safe as the harbor. The ship has no purpose--no life--at anchor.
And a little bit of a very bad thing is sometimes good. You may be one of the few (10%) who've noted that the very distant barely-perceptible smell of a skunk is paradoxically... ahh... interesting. (I think it's even used in perfumes, but don't expect them to admit that to you.)
Likewise, life is often difficult, but sometimes difficulties can be good for us.
So my purpose here is to cause you to doubt; and to make you more insecure! Ready? We'll look at things with an exaggerated upside-down view, to help us understand the topside better.
Security, Certainty, and Control. The more the better? You say they're basic drives in life. Sure, we all have a drive toward safety and security.
We all think we want and need control. The more the better. Some people are preoccupied with it to the point of neurosis. Relax; we, as a species, have it. Unfortunately for all other life. A mere flick of our collective Bic, and a forest-full of life is dead! Our control is not perfect, fortunately. If it were, we wouldn't be wise enough to avoid disaster in its use.
The desires for security, certainty, and control are natural and usually healthy, and nobody would tell you to reject them. That's obvious. (However, on the personal level, you can't have control till you let go of it.) I'm not telling you to reject whatever security you have or can get --and wisdom is always in order.
Therefore, it's my habit to test thoughts by looking at their extreme. Wisdom requires an occasional look at even ridiculous-seeming alternatives and perspectives.
Consider: maybe you're better off without a lot of security. Is there a negative side to being secure? Let's take a look at the human condition of insignificance and jeopardy. Let's start with the universe and work our way up to... you. Save the best for last, right?
We sit on a tiny planet that falls in a circle around an inconspicuous star named Sol, and is mutually circled by an even smaller planet named Luna (which is not a satellite of the Earth, but of Sol). We are somewhere near the edge of our average galaxy, among vast billions of other galaxies, at an unknown distance from an unknown center. In this galaxy, Sol is one of the vast hundreds of billions and billions of other stars, way out in one of the galaxy's spiral arms. We're in sparsely populated territory; rural, so to speak. Sol is smaller than the average star, and it's beginning to appear that having a planetary system is not that unusual in single stars, either.
And this planetary system? If we go by size, it consists of Jupiter... and some debris. One of the smaller pieces of debris is mostly liquid--floating, falling, in a vacuum--and is called Earth. Liquid. Oceans, you're thinking. No, they're insignificant. Well, Earth is all rock otherwise, right? Wrong. The most plentiful liquid of Earth is much too hot to swim in; ask someone in Hawaii.
The surface of Earth seems so rock-solid that nothing about it could hurt us. But that crust is only about thirty kilometers deep, average, and Earth's diameter is almost thirteen thousand. The part beneath is well over two hundred times thicker than the crust, and it's essentially magma; that is, lava! That, by far, is the predominate liquid of this planet. Not water; white-hot magma! Like the example of Jupiter, Earth is lava... plus a paper-thin crust.
It's interesting.... Let's see what percent that is, by weight. This fragile, shifting crust of the Earth is less than half of 1 percent of the Earth's weight! Insignificant! Your whole life, you're trusting your life to a rocky crust that is thinner, in proportion, than an eggshell. All the rest of the Earth--all the way thru to the crust on the other side--is liquid. Picture a cut-away of the Earth in those proportions, with the center white, then red. Thousands of kilometers of rock so hot that it stays melted.
Too big; we'll have to reduce the scale. If we see the Earth's crust as lake-ice one inch thick, the deadly lake (that killer magma) beneath is 22 feet deep. You must stand on this thin crust all your life, while it moves and cracks. (Earthquakes; another killer.) And you felt that this fragile crust on the melted-rock "lake"--this so-called Terra Firma--was safely solid all the way down?
And the air? If it were all the same pressure, it would go only five kilometers up. On this scale, it would extend only an eighth of an inch off the ice. So there you are--smaller in scale too, of course--but standing on one inch of cracking ice, twenty-two feet of death-dealing lava an inch below your feet, and one-eighth of an inch of air to breathe. Above that is the pure vacuum of space that would also kill you.
* Seen another way, this nation is five thousand kilometers across, so the relative thickness of the air is a thousand to one. The distance around the world is equal to twenty-five thousand trips up and down the atmosphere. It's shallow. No wonder our air pollution is so bad.
Hey; things are sure to level off... as soon as they hit bottom!
We live our lives between killer lava and dead vacuum, and not far from either. Terrifying? No, it's wonderful. With all that supposed insecurity, our species has done just fine for two million years!
That's the point, you see. Other, more psychological insecurities are terrifying in no greater proportion than that.
Here, we get to you. This is what you were waiting for. Here you will find that you don't want security, not really; at least not too much of it. I know, you still don't believe it.
Ok; consider: a deeply-felt security in something is finally followed, as night the day, by the taking for granted of that thing. ... Take our constitution for granted, and someone is sure to shred it. (For our own good, of course;-)
The treasured thing that is known absolutely... is soon absolutely lost. It may still be in your hands, but is not given the attention of your mind, and that is what makes it tragic. That thing--or that person--is wasted on you, as an awesome Sierra landscape is wasted on a field-mouse. Out of mind, out of sight, out of life.
A person unsure that he will live to see the sunrise is sure to treasure it when it comes, but a person sure of all things has no treasure at all. He will "sleep through" those things forever. Then, when it disappears... when the well runs dry... it may be the most profitable day of his life. He will learn appreciation.
To have everything, and feel used to it--as I imagine someone born to great riches--is to have nothing. Nothing but an empty feeling, perhaps in a way even as frustrating an experience as to have nothing... and well know what you don't have.
"Things" may here apply as well to people: acquaintances, friends, mates. Don't do any of these the disservice of any kind of guarantee, for it would necessarily be false. But more importantly, to the degree you felt the guarantee was true, it would insure that they would soon be taken for granted.
To feel absolutely safe with something is to lose it. I don't mean that you will lose it, but that you've already lost it. If you feel a slight doubt--an insecurity--about someone... it is healthy, not insulting. That doubt gives you an added attentiveness and awareness of desire; thus, appreciation.
On the other side of the coin, you want to stay vital to your friends and mates. Know that if you are taken as someone totally known, secure, and safe... that you may be somewhat lost to them, tho you haven't moved or changed.
The sight of the "wife in hair-curlers"... and the husband, occasionally unkempt... at least has the beneficial effect of presenting a contrast. Without some such changes, even a beauty may, though herself unchanged, fade into the general landscape. Is that the security you want?
Maximum security is a term used in prisons, isn't it? Total security would be solitary confinement. Is that the security you want?
If you feel totally secure, it may be that you're not taking any chances; not really doing anything new with your life. That's like not having one, just like someone totally insecure.
The drive for security is understandable, at least genetically. Back in the cave, darkness may really have hid L,T,& Bs (Lions, Tigers & Bears). You might really have fallen down the cliff when the fire was out and the moon wasn't.
So consider the brave biker (anything on 2 wheels, let alone one). He's in a constant state of falling and correcting--dealing with insecurity 100% of the time.
Security is not to be envied; it causes apathy. If uncertainty increases your attention, and gives you an increase in felt-life, then, conversely, certainty gives you an increase in felt-death. You wouldn't envy that.
We may well pity someone their false security, but we can also pity them for what they feel are their real securities. They are more likely to lose that treasure.
Complete security is hell. I refer you to an excellent old Twilight Zone story where a very bad man died and went to Well, he didn't know. It was a perfectly beautiful place. He was given his slightest whim and great luxury, tho he could think of nothing he'd ever done to deserve it. All women wanted him; at the pool table,with one stroke, all the balls rolled into the pockets. Every time. He was assured that nothing he would ever do would turn out less than perfectly. Forever. Imagine; absolutely no doubts; no insecurities. Now, there's a new vision of Hell!
Where all is secure, all is lost to you. You can't have anything--not really have it--unless you hold it loosely. A butterfly....
* In so-called national security: have no fear of "them": the communists, the Chinese, the Arabs, the CIA, or whoever the currently popular "enemy" is--we've met the enemy and he is us; same as always.
Many in of us in "our" society still encourage the suppression of our human natures, and encourage the belief in some certainty. ( I must admit, on the "topside" of this view, that it is today's obsessively insecure people who still foment suppression.) That suppression is vastly less than it used to be, but our natural striving for freedom is still repulsed by it. People who can stifle themselves out of their very human nature cannot be trusted... or truly loved.
Curiosity, I'm sure you'll agree, is a basic human nature, and doubt is its mate. Each would die without the other. If doubt is the beginning of wisdom, then the lack of doubt is the end of it. When someone has destroyed their ability to doubt, they've destroyed their potential for growth; their humanity.
When doubt is killed, dogma grows. Dogma is the result of the drive for certainty in old insecure institutions. And orthodoxy--literally--is to be frozen in past dogma. It is fear and denial of possible futures, and it is a desperate desire for certainty. The goal of an orthodox life is to sleep through it; a continuous suicide. The murder of every moment, every possibility, as it comes freely to you. D.O.A. How pointless.
Certainty robs us of some ability to feel. It dulls awareness, and that lessens our appreciation.
Certainty robs us of some ability to think. After all, what we believe to be already certain would need no thought, no investigation.
This fear of uncertainty can chill your heart. You know that in most cultures yet today, it's still seen as almost a crime to have a doubt about the orthodox beliefs that were imposed on that culture by their predecessors.
We must not commit thought-crime. Orthodox groups must use an unnatural force--a perverse action in the name of intended beneficence--and at a person's early, helpless age--to push that barrier to thought down our throats, and to kill our healthy doubts. But it happens; almost universally. Our elders subtly train us in self-defeat. We are told what to believe, before we learn how to test beliefs. Would you want to fly in an airliner designed by a person trained that way?! (A government?)
How then, for people to be secure in the first place? And how to dis-inculcate them from the prisons of our parents fears? Those fears that our parents felt as noble... caused them to lock us into those same fears at an early age... for our own supposed protection. "Don't ever leave the harbor!"
Beware of any authority that tries to tell you what reality is. Learn what helps you to see past--or get past--any barriers you may have between yourself and reality. Reality is right there, free for the taking. If you can get to it.... Not as easy as it sounds.
Yes, the acceptance of even one supposed certainty begins to cripple our minds; it diminishes all humanity; it retards our progress in all arenas. People were once told to believe that everything important was already known. Such blind and easy pseudo-certainties, and such strong desires for security, were at the heart of the Dark Ages. Ask those who tried to show us the marvelous, mysterious, free-fall universe; ask Galileo, or better, Kopernigk (Copernicus). For their curiosity and doubt, those with power threatened them with the horrible deaths that were imposed upon some of their peers.
Ask them. They'll tell you: innovation and investigation into nature's true beauty become subversive, suspect, dangerous activities. They'll tell you... that one scientific path toward the truth, when made dangerous, causes all people to tread cautiously on all roads. Or to tread no roads at all.
But we are now past most of the effects of the Dark Age; we can, if we try, trust enough to look at the universe and accept it as it is, live in reality, and even feel an ecstasy in the knowledge that we are part of the grand order and chaos of things.
Therefore; give rein to your trust and pacify your fear. Treasure your doubts, hold your uncertainties dear; for without them, your vitality will drain, and your interest in life itself will diminish. When not accepted, they are a millstone on the neck, a paralysis of life. When accepted, they are the vitality and stimulus of life and progress. Hurray for doubt; long live uncertainty!
There you have a new look, from a new angle, at the nature of our most-ignored desire: security. I hope I've encouraged you to live a little more bravely. I hope I've made you a little more doubting and insecure.
Now, what risky --yet not unwise-- thing are you encouraged to do?
Remember Lovelock's phrase: that the atmosphere of all planets with life have "exuberant disequilibrium"? I say that all people with lives should have that quality as well!
Another line (of mine) of a quotable kind: (Remember the Twilight Zone story, above.) There is no challenge, no delight in the effort toward a sure thing.