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?

Disappointment Trails

I mentioned in my last post that the landscapes of our emotions start to get artistically interesting when we start to see the same National Park of Emotion described by different people.  As images and stories about the same park come in, I’m seeing some synchronicities in the geographical features, color palettes, and image patterns. You can see what I mean by looking at two submissions about the National Park of Disappointment:

View fullsize

Disappointment Ramble, Amy Schiff, 2020

“So much disappointment at this park. This should have been a year of making plans and centerpieces for my daughter's Bat Mitzvah. So many choices to make it a special and quirky day. Inviting family from all over to make the trip and all be in the same room for the first time.

Now I see snippets of what would have been, like a winding path I can't actually get to off in the distance. It reminds me of the Ramble in Central Park, where meandering always led you somewhere wonderful and new. But there isn't any way to get there from here.  

We will still fill the day with all the meaning we can with the small group of family we will be allowed to have there. She has been working diligently for months and I wish we could celebrate this sweet and imaginative girl with friends and family with a big old hora. So sad and disappointed we cannot give her what we have been picturing for her for years. She deserves it.”

Amy Schiff, Age 45
Scarsdale, NY

Disappointment Trail, Rhonda Gutenberg, 2020

“I have been very fortunate during the pandemic in that I still manage to see friends for outdoor activities like hiking and tennis, and most of my work (management consulting and coaching) was already by videoconference, from home. While grateful in many ways, I slink into disappointment when I see so many people not taking this situation seriously and ignoring safety recommendations. We got through the summer and into the fall, our numbers were looking positive and restrictions getting lifted - and then boom – Thanksgiving and subsequent surges. The reinstituted liberties we were appreciating like never before were taken away, once again.

My hike on Disappointment Trail wanders through the California Redwoods, on a shady, dirt trail, with dead, brown leaves scattering the path. It is cool, dank and quiet and I am in solitude. Brown is a primary color amid the dark green leaves of the redwoods and sun is beyond the shelter of this path. I am disappointed and sad but hopeful. Each morning, we never know what we will wake up to, and I await the days when those surprises are uplifting rather than upsetting.”

Rhonda Gutenberg, Age 63
Sausalito, CA

I’m intrigued by how two people, on two different coasts of the United States, both picture disappointment as a trail or a winding path with brown as the dominant color. Not everyone’s parks of the same emotion look as similar as these, sometimes there are just small echoes and patterns that emerge. But it’s only by getting more submissions about each park that we can start exploring the topography of each feeling.

Of the dozens of emotions we’ve all been navigating this past year, disappointment has to be one of the most common ones. Disappointment rises up when we have an unmet expectation—and really, whose year went as they expected? So many plans changed, events canceled, opportunities gone. All the people we were looking forward to seeing and hugging in person, replaced by making do with conversations and connection through screens.

Disappointment can be a hard emotion to admit to sometimes though, when there is so much pain in the world. It’s easy to tell oneself that some disappointments are no big deal, to brush them aside, to not even recognize that we’re in the National Park of Disappointment. But like all emotions, I think it’s crucial to acknowledge when we’re wandering around there.

Among many disappointments, I had multiple trips canceled, both overseas and ones just across the US/Canadian border. I live in Canada but grew up in New York, so my entire family and tons of close friends are in the US. I usually go back many times a year, and shortly before the pandemic I moved from Toronto to Montreal. I was so excited to be much closer to New York City and Boston, and had looked forward to easy weekend trips. We also missed a family wedding that was re-planned as a small socially distanced event. I heard it was lovely, but we couldn’t go. The border feels like the Berlin wall now.

View fullsize

National Park of Disappointment, Mindy Stricke, 2021

The descriptions of the National Park of Disappointment above resonate strongly, and inspire mine, in which the paths are full of dead ends. I wander down one path that’s headed for my annual family reunion at the beach, and then hit a stone wall, the sand and the sea beyond reach on the other side. Turning around, I follow a sign that says, “This way to sleepaway camp for your kids (and some freedom for the adults),” to be met by another wall. And on and on this year. The only way to lower the walls is to lower the expectations. I expect nothing right now, because getting my hopes up just keeps me in that park. 

What have been some of your pandemic-related disappointments? What does your National Park of Disappointment look like and feel like?

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?

What are you yearning for?

The National Parks of Emotion project and the connections I’m making with so many of you who have participated give me a sense of purpose and meaning during these uncertain times when I have no idea what’s happening next—among so many other things, when I’ll be able to see my family or close friends who live in the states. I’m in Canada, and I haven’t seen my parents since February 2020. My dad’s 80th birthday was this past week. They both received the vaccine, and I’m incredibly grateful for that, so it just feels like a matter of holding on and being patient. But it’s still really hard. I know so many of you are dealing with similar separations. I’ve received a couple submissions about the National Park of Yearning, and I related instantly. Here’s one that really hit me, I feel like I could have written it myself:

View fullsize

It’s a deep valley and I’m at the very bottom, waiting to get out. I’ve been here since March. There are times when it feels like I have climbed for so long and I’m nearly out, nearly at the top. Like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. When I reach the top, I will get to see my family that I have been so desperately missing for 9 months—the US-Canada border keeping us apart.

But then the camera pans back out, and I see that I’ve still got a long way to go. The cases keep rising, the lockdowns continue, the border remains shut. I long to be reunited with my family. I think of how magical it will be when I see them again. 

I’ve experienced a particularly intense loss of a loved one before, so I am not completely unfamiliar with these feelings of missing and yearning and longing.

I yearn to be close to them, to hear my niece laugh again, to hold my nephew in my arms for the first time, to embrace my mother, to hear my dad tell a bad joke. We connect nearly every day virtually, but I yearn for real connection again.

— Anonymous, age 28

Yearning is an interesting emotion—given the current circumstances, I instantly think of it as an unpleasant feeling, but one of the participants wrote to me about how it can also be a pleasant feeling of longing. Maybe it’s a mixed emotion, in some cases, or perhaps it depends on what you’re yearning for, and why.

It’s been about a month since the last National Parks of Emotion Art Lab. So many of you have told me that you’re eager to hear about what’s happening with the project since then, and I’m eager to share. I’ll tell you what’s happening over the next while, as a series of Art Lab reports.

Meanwhile, what are you yearning for? Is it a pleasant or unpleasant feeling for you?