Sunday, October 7, 2012

the thing about uncertainty


The deeper we go in, the more I realize the beauty (and the curse), the fascinating and the pulse raising thing about owning a restaurant is all the uncertainty that floats around. There is no way of knowing "you've made it", or that "you've gotten there". There's no way of knowing if you'll be around, if you'll be popular in a month, if the buzz will keep on. Each day you shoot high and hope for the best and you wake up wanting "better". Uncertainty makes you shiver and then aggressively pushes you forward. 

Owning a restaurant requires sprinting while running a marathon. It’s about putting all your energy into one night and making it magical, fantastic, memorable. 5pm rolls around and you begin pouring it all out, the dark takes over and you surrender to it and its flow, its mistakes and its gifts, you leave it all out there on the floor. The next morning you wake up with soreness of the body, the heart and of the mind. Still, there’s this force that helps you fight through it. You get up and you do it all over again. And I have to believe that force is uncertainty. In the right light, uncertainty is that very thing that pushes you, keeps you present, makes you feel alive, the one thing that opens you up to it all (for the good and for the bad). Not knowing where you'll be tomorrow hurries you to get there.

As we keep on keeping on, maybe we'll beat it or maybe it will get the best of us, but I believe if we are open to it, if we let it, uncertainty might be the one thing that gets us to where we want to go and best of all, it’s the thing that will keep us humble all the way through.