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One of the higher skills that separates us from most of the animal kingdom is the ability to imagine. Imagination and creativity have no doubt lead to much progress.  Science fiction writers like H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft and Isaac Asimov gave us the encouragement to dream beyond our current state. The communicator on Star Trek became the flip phone, and Dick Tracy’s watch became the Apple Watch. Things that we still marvel at will most likely be normal for my granddaughter. Our ability to think out-of-the-box and transcend our limitations makes the potential for unlimited possibilities so exciting. But that is just one of two paths. The other is to imagine the negative.

Despite the best of intentions and desires, when you sit in a surgical waiting room, imagination prefers the negative route. The entire range of poor outcomes flashes by, overwhelming the other desires for positive outcomes. It’s a struggle to maintain the supremacy of hope, not because there are unanswered questions, but because there cannot be definitive answers. Human error, no matter how rare, does exist in the surgical suite. Unknown possibilities can occur. Regardless of the confidence in the medical team, perhaps it is inherently part of our DNA to review all potential outcomes. Of course we want to focus solely on excellent results, but that annoying creature called “nagging doubt” just refuses to go away. Unlike the Mucinex commercial, it remains in the corner, a reminder that nothing can be guaranteed.

Hope and faith remain strong, encouraged and called upon constantly, but it can be a struggle to dismiss nagging doubt as the clock ticks away. Time seems to progress much more slowly, as though the Theory of Relativity does not apply. Regular glancing at the clock is futile, as each presupposed duration is only three minutes. The status update board remains the same. Perhaps it is some sort of corollary of Murphy’s Law that the faster you want time to pass the slower it goes. Sort of like the fact that the worser the weather, the longer the dog wants to walk.

We don’t like uncertainty, because you can’t hang your hat on it. We want certainty, answers and clarity in our lives, when the truth is, all of it makes up our lives. There will be times of certainty, and times of uncertainty. The challenge is to take the good elements of one and figure out how to inject them into the other. At times we are successful; sometimes we are less successful. The only certainty right now is that at some point the wait will be over and there will be answers, most likely leading to the next round of questions and more uncertainty. The see-saw of our existence unites all of us.

Did you ever try to carefully climb the see-saw to stand at the metal bar in the middle? All of us want balance, equilibrium in our lives. Some of us might be really good at reaching that middle bar and standing there for quite a while. Some of us can do it for a brief time, yet others not at all. Perhaps the simple see-saw describes us best: each of us will have the highs and lows, hopefully enjoying the ride with glee. Sometimes we will be up, sometimes down. The real achievement is in having made the ride at all.

Postscript: Prayers were answered . All went well.