Navigating the National Park of Uncertainty

I’ve received over 60 different emotions so far for the National Parks of Emotion project, and the emotion I’ve received the most submissions about so far is not surprising at all.

The National Park of Uncertainty, Lucian, 2021

Uncertainty was neck and neck with anxiety, but I just ran a small workshop with students at the Orchard Lyceum School in Toronto and uncertainty pulled ahead. (As an aside, what they did was amazing—kids of course are creative and brilliant and imagine their parks in totally unexpected ways. Exhibit A is the image above, which was made by a 10-year-old. I mean, wow.) 

Of course, those two emotions go hand in hand. Uncertainty breeds anxiety, there’s no doubt about it. It will be interesting to see the similarities between those two parks as they get fleshed out. I imagine the parks as side-by-side, or maybe they overlap. I think there are probably exits from the National Park of Uncertainty that seamlessly meld with the entrance to the National Park of Anxiety, so that you don’t even realize that you’re in a new place.

What’s interesting about uncertainty to me is that anxiety doesn't have to be the only response to it (although it’s important to say that if what you’re uncertain about is whether you’ll be able to feed your family or have a roof over your head, or if you’re particularly vulnerable to the virus, or any number of circumstances that makes your situation precarious, that is a different story.) I’m talking about the kind of uncertainty that you can handle, you just don’t know what’s coming.

In so many ways the pandemic has been about practicing how to live with uncertainty. It still feels very uncomfortable, and it’s not a place I like to be. But I’ve found that despite my planning nature, I’m slightly better at dealing with it now than I was a year ago. Last spring it felt tortuous not knowing when my kids were going back to school, what bad news the next week would bring, having no idea what the summer would look like. 

Now, as I look ahead again, I still feel upset when I think about not knowing when I’m going to see my parents, friends, family again, or when things will go back to “normal,” whatever that might look like, but I’ve accepted it a little more. This extended period of uncertainty has highlighted the fact that certainty is an illusion in the first place. Very Buddhist, which is not surprising, as the whole project was inspired by a meditation.

All of this is to tell you why I started with Uncertainty as the first National Park of Emotion you can visit on its own web page. I’m using StoryMaps, a platform for digital storytelling that incorporates maps and geography:

The National Park of Uncertainty

Click here to visit

The page is a work in progress. After all, we’re in the process of documenting and describing this park together! I’ll be adding to it when I open submissions again soon, playing with ideas and mediums there. (You’ll notice some video I made of the park, inspired by what’s come in so far. More about that soon too.) I’ll also be adding more parks on StoryMaps as I go along. It’s a fun way to share the research.

Now that I think of it, I like that I’m starting with the National Park of Uncertainty, because there’s a lot of uncertainty I have with the project itself, too. I know intellectually that uncertainty is in the nature of the creative process, but that still doesn’t make it easy. How will it evolve? How am I going to reach more people? What will work artistically? Will I be able to juggle everything? And, and…

I think I’ll get back to practicing just sitting in this park again. This bench looks good.

How have you managed the uncertainty of the pandemic? Have you adjusted to it at all? If so, what has helped?

Pandemic Emotions: A Snapshot

I now have over 100 submissions for the National Parks of Emotions project, after running three workshops. I’ve been spending time making charts to see what emotions I have, where the patterns are, and what would be interesting to get more of. It’s a small sample of course, but it starts to paint a picture of how people have been feeling during the pandemic. It’s been fun to play around with word clouds, which map the size of the word based on the frequency it occurs:

You can see from the word cloud some of the dominant emotions that are swirling around— loneliness, gratitude, anxiety, uncertainty, all different kinds of sadness. 

You might also wonder how I’m defining an emotion for the project. I’ll go more into depth in a future post about what I’m reading and thinking about regarding theories and definitions of emotions and what they are. I’ve been learning a ton and it’s really fascinating. 

Some people might feel that concepts like “betrayal”, “untetheredness”, or “creativity” are not emotions, but I’m taking a very broad view at this point. If it’s an emotion concept or feeling that someone in a culture somewhere (even if it’s not an English emotion word) could communicate and someone else would know what they’re talking about, then that’s fine for now. It could be a emotion word that’s consists of a mix of other emotions, that’s fine too (for example, angst is a combination of anxiety and dread). As long as you can say, “Because of the pandemic, I feel _____”, then for the purposes of this project it’s a national park of emotion that you can visit and describe, and I want to hear about it. 

I’ve realized though, that while I love hearing about all of the varieties of emotions, that for the next round of submissions, I’m going to ask people to start filling in the parks more. I still want to give people the freedom to choose an emotion, but I need multiple submissions for each park so there’s more material in each. Comparing and contrasting what your uncertainty or frustration looks like compared to mine is where it starts to get particularly interesting artistically. I’ll share an example of that in a coming post.

Meanwhile, I would love your help and feedback about the following two questions:

• Which National Parks of Emotion would you like to see that I don’t have yet?

• Which ones should I gather more stories about, that feel crucial to include as part of our collective emotional pandemic experience?