Uncomfortable With Certainty

A friend asked me what I saw myself doing in five years. That's the kind of question to which I usually don't have an answer. Planning long term, longer term has never been my forte. Perhaps this has something to do with the many sudden moves I experienced as child. My response to the question was that I'll probably continue to follow my nose.

Here are words from Parabola magazine's emailed newsletter of June 24 that serve to reassure me about my MO:

Another way of putting it would be (without knowing Chinese) to
propose this new translation of the first line of the Tao Te Ching:
A way that is entirely laid out, no, it is not the way. I told you
that I have encountered in my life a true teaching. One of the signs
of its truth, for me, is that it never proposes an entirely
prescribed path. No, at every step the entire dilemma is revisited.
For me, nothing is resolved once and for all. And what I have always
loved in you is your refusal of a prearranged path, and that is
important to me because alone one can't sustain such a position. We
must be a number of people to help each other, to awaken one
another.

Rene Daumal from a letter to Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, November
1941 from PARABOLA, Fall 2009: The Path.