The importance of embracing the unknown

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Gillian Deacon is the author of A Love Affair with the Unknown: Leaning into the Uncertainty of Modern Life.

The door was unremarkable, wedged between an out-of-business cocktail bar and a hair salon, bearing no signage to indicate I was in the right place. After double-checking the address on my phone, I entered cautiously and made my way up the narrow stairwell. My feet on the brown tiled steps made the only sound. Neon lighting flickered overhead. At the second floor landing a man popped out of a doorway marked “Computer Fix” to ask if I was here for the laptop. “Sorry, no,” I said and continued up the next flight of stairs.

I recognized the quickening of my pulse, the sharpness of my attention; my anticipation antennae were up. What was coming next?

From the archives: Feel like a failure at happiness? Try embracing uncertainty

Sometimes we are forced into uncomfortable circumstances, and usually spend much of our time trying to get out of them. But we can also seek out the unfamiliar by choice.

For a long time I have wanted to learn how to play mah-jong, the tile-based game that originated in 19th-century China. The lore of the game fascinates me, though I’ve only ever seen it played in movies. I don’t know anyone who plays or who wants to join me in learning. So tonight I resolved to give it a try on my own.

Emerging from the stairwell onto the top floor I stepped onto a bright red mat marked WELCOME and entered a new world: the Wong Association community centre’s Wednesday night mah-jong club. A volunteer named Brandon ushered me immediately into a large room scattered with card tables. The comforting scent of frying oil hung lightly in the air. Red paper lanterns dangled from a central light fixture, above which blue sky beamed through angled skylights. A display of Chinese artwork graced the front wall. Though he likely knew before asking, Brandon politely ascertained that I was a beginner and ushered me to a table with five or six other newcomers. We introduced ourselves, a diverse collection of the mahjong-curious: most of us had neither age, experience nor cultural background in common. Our main unifier was the intrigue of this centuries-old game whose mysteries we wanted to crack.

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A mandarin orange was placed at each corner of the table. In the centre was a jumbled pile of thick plastic tiles with frosted mint green backs and creamy white fronts adorned with a dizzying array of unfamiliar iconography. I panicked briefly seeing Chinese characters on many of the tiles, swirls of graceful marks utterly inscrutable to me. Right on cue, Brandon handed out a cheat sheet translating the images into numbers I recognized. Someone who introduced himself as Arvin, wearing a wool sweater and tuque on this impossibly warm spring evening, explained the rules. I could feel my mind cramping as it scrambled to learn the details and tried not to be distracted wondering why Arvin was so overdressed. My head was abuzz trying to keep up with the barrage of new stimuli. And I never wanted this feeling to end.

When we learn something new, we literally change our minds. New neurons and pathways fire up as the brain responds to novel stimuli, increasing neural plasticity and an openness to learn even more new things – what I like to call a love affair with the unknown. Exploring, trying new things, pushing through discomfort to see what might lie beyond the familiar feels good because it gives the brain a hit of dopamine. What we think of as the feel-good hormone is actually more fully understood as a prediction error chemical – released when something turns out to be better than we had expected, thus something we experience best by pushing past what we know. Since we usually fear change more than we need to, we very often get a dopamine hit when we step into the unknown.

First Person: Living with uncertainty has taught me some valuable lessons

Stepping outside our comfort zone offers more than just a temporary flood of good feelings; it’s actually the only way we grow. For its varying degrees of unpleasantness, uncertainty is the necessary fuel for a richer, more meaningful life. If everything somehow stayed the same, all within our capacity to predict and order, we would never expand our thinking. Facing challenge and change is literally the only way to build our accomplishments and grow stronger for having navigated it. Getting uncomfortable opens our minds to new ideas, what neuropsychologists call cognitive disinhibition; the more we learn to handle uncertainty, the more uncertainty we can handle.

Part of our discomfort with the wild unpredictability of the modern world comes, I believe, from deconditioning to the unfamiliar. Technology doesn’t help; our phones, for instance, have made us more dependent and neutered our agility. Every app that offers a shortcut – weather, navigation, automated parking payment, preselected grocery orders – is also by definition removing some interactions that, tedious as they may be, have historically kept our coping muscles in shape: pausing, reflecting, choosing, evaluating, waiting. By speeding us through the process, technology removes friction; it shaves off layers of the experience of dealing with challenges, and makes us less inclined to want to face them. Intentionally putting ourselves into unfamiliar and unknown circumstances is a way to combat that deconditioning.

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Learning to recognize and calibrate unfamiliar sequences (draw four tiles at a time, clockwise from the cut), inputting fresh details (the table wind always begins in the East), asking questions (what does a Dragon tile do?) – figuring out the rules of a new game steeped in history and cultural traditions that are not my own is a delicious dose of the best kind of friction.

Finding a new challenge doesn’t have to be unpleasant. On the contrary. Seated on the hard plastic of the community centre’s folding chairs I felt electric with aliveness, awash in fresh details: 144 tiles. Stack in double rows of 18, assemble into four walls positioned on the diagonal. Roll dice, counter clockwise count. Extra turn for a flower tile. A pong takes precedence over a seung. I ran through the list of steps, trying not to stumble. The rhythm of the game began to stir. More players joined – a white woman named Debra with grey hair and gold-rimmed glasses, a young Chinese man named Chris who wore a medical mask – adding to the cascade of names and faces to process, not a soul I’d ever seen before. The soundtrack to it all was the delightful swirling clickety-clack of all those gorgeous green and white tiles being shuffled, their hard acrylic edges smashing against one another in what I’m told is called a “chattering of sparrows.” Waves of joy surged through me; this novelty was fuel I hadn’t known I needed. More rows, more pairs and sets; the slow dawn of recognition as patterns of understanding fluttered into place.

I found myself savouring details of what would otherwise have been an ordinary Wednesday evening: the deep crackle of Arvin’s laugh; the elegance in each tiny brushstroke depicting different flower tiles; the sinewy forearm of the woman across the table from me, rippling the pattern of her tattoo; the quixotic soundscape of clacking tiles punctuated by victory cries. I relished every aspect of this experience. Routine and habit have their place, but also tend to put us on autopilot. In the unfamiliar, it’s as though time slows down to allow the richness of being alive more of a chance to show off, supercharging every minute with vitality.

After one open-handed round, through which I asked questions like a kindergarten pupil trying desperately to keep up with a flurry of new learning, Debra and I were moved to another table to make room for new arrivals at the beginner section. (How was I already no longer a beginner?) Our new tablemates were a young couple but clearly old hands at mah-jong, consistently generous and patient with the novice players. Alice and Joe had come to Canada from Britain after spending two COVID years playing mah-jong with their parents, ready to burst after being sequestered for so long with family but wanting to hold on to the cultural tradition of this pastime they had learned to love. They had taken flight into something new, just because.

Kurt Vonnegut said “we have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” Learning mah-jong is a pretty safe unknown into which to leap. But the exercise was really a fun reminder of something I’ve learned in more painful ways: leaning into uncertainty is the only way we grow. It doesn’t always feel good or come with sweet fruit on the table, but making our way through hard things strengthens our tolerance for uncertainty, like fortifying our psychological immune system. When we lean into uncertainty, we discover our own resilience.

I’ll be back for more mah-jong, and one of these weeks I’ll march right past the beginner table. The setting will no longer feel unknown, having expanded my reach for what constitutes familiar. I’m looking forward to seeing this crew again, along with whatever fresh crop of novices venture up that unassuming stairwell to give something new a try.