The Value of Uncertainty

Ben Wildsmith 

Towards the end of one of those stultifying afternoons last week, I open the back door and stare at the mountain behind our house.

It’s quiet out as everybody shelters from the heat, chopping up spring onions and ladling out coleslaw. The Rhondda in sunshine is beautiful, if slightly disorientating.

The grey stone of our houses, which looks so matched with the iron skies and slanting rain they are built for, seems over lit on a rare day like this. The sun picks out missing pointing and peeling paint – details we miss until summer slows down our eyes.

I’m taking in the hues of the grass rising up to the ridge that leads to Llanwonno. My mum had a book about a blind woman whose sight was restored. In it, she described seeing grass for the first time and feeling outraged that it had been described as green. ‘It was a thousand different colours,’ she protested.

So, I try to pick out yellows and browns, noticing them deliberately. You know, being present, like we’re supposed to. I’m also smoking a fag, because I’m weak, fallible and less cocksure than I let on. I’m living and dying in the same moment, like everything everywhere.

The sun dips, revealing a different palette again in the grass, is that burnt umber? I don’t know, let’s just decide that it is, why not? An old-style bicycle bell rings sharply from the lane that joins our road on a sharp diagonal.

It seems to come from the past and surely belongs to a religious spinster on her way back from dusting the chapel, her routine immovable through wars, strikes, and climate change.

But no, wobbling round the bend comes a little boy on a brand-new electric scooter. Well turned out, with a helmet clamped to his head, he’s flying solo and about to join an actual road where there might be cars.

I watch him negotiating the bend, eyes darting from side to side as he remembers instructions from home. Watch out for cars, ring your bell to let people know you are coming, keep to the left, slow into corners…

He’s a study in anxious concentration, thrilled and sickened by peril. As he turns into the road, down which a car hasn’t driven in half an hour, he rings his bell again just in case. Only I hear it, but I can testify if his dad needs reassurance.

He’s got about forty yards to go before the dead end and beckoning accomplishment straightens his wheels. I out my cigarette as he dismounts and turn his steed around for the homeward leg. He’s going to be alright.

Later, cooking under the big light in my room, I idle through Facebook. Big, certain, unasked-for opinions glare from my laptop demanding resignations, deportations, longer sentences, crackdowns and common bloody sense.

Assumptions

One person’s crime attaches to thousands as assumption is our favourite pastime. They’re all the same. The brass bells of easy condemnation begin to drown out the day’s music.

Closing it down, I recall the uncertainty in the boy’s eyes; his alertness to the myriad obstacles between what he wanted and what might happen; how he carved his way through nervy solitude towards one of those small victories that mean everything. How he thought nobody saw him do it but didn’t mind.

Our humanity lives in trepidation, caught between desire and fear, we reveal ourselves to each other in lonely struggles.

Our boldness is the shiny reward for all those queasy moments wondering if we know what we’re doing or even belong here at all. There, in the uneasy flux of trying to improve, lies our greatness.