Ambiguity

Written in response to a question from a friend as to whether or not a single defining moment could be mined from my life…

My defining, seminal moment was more an intellectual epiphany. 1984, my best friend, a college professor 14 years my senior, introduced the intellectual concept of ‘ambiguity’. It was as if a door that had been slammed shut was flung open, revealing the world, an entirely new world, to me. By definition, embracing ambiguity made it ridiculously easy to shed 24 years of the yoke of Catholic dogma. To be suddenly cast into a world where it not only was OK to be uncertain, but where the word “maybe” became an intellectual construct, and the concluding punctuation when wrestling with the philosophical and esoteric conundrums that face us all was no longer a period, but a comma.

That has made me who I am, more than anything else. It is abstract, yes. I have had many concrete, definable events in my life, they have all contributed to who I am….and the one constant through all of them is ambiguity.