The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves. The great pitfall of prediction is that, mercifully, we are unpredictable. —“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of our civilization’s great works of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. This is the paradox we live with: We crave certainty, only to discover over and over that it is a mirage, that the love of life is rooted in the courage of uncertainty — because certainty doesn’t allow for surprise, but everything we know of life is the product of the wildest bet that prevailed against the odds of otherwise so we may exist; because certainty thrives on clear category and neat classification, but the most meaningful experiences we have inhabit the liminal spaces between the common categories of what we can name.NASA engineer Lisa Rosenberg offers a lovely ode to the life-force of uncertainty in the title poem from her altogether ravishing collection Weeds and Stars (public library) — the finest reverie of reality since Diane Ackerman’s The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, with the feeling-tone of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the sensibility of astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe:WEEDS AND STARSby Lisa RosenbergWeeds and stars and everything between,from ocean dwellers to accretion disks —resilient, intact, or wholly fragmented —recall the transience of clouds.The ocean dwellers and accretion disks,the finest river stones and faintest moonsrecall the transience of clouds,of harmonies at work in gorgeous noise.The faintest moon, the finest river stone,the lucid silences at play in dreamsfind harmony at work in gorgeous noise.Let night and day be open quandariesin play with silences and lucid dreams.Forget the cries for certainty, the heftof night and day and open quandaries,the pitch-perfected music of the spheres.The case for certainty forgets the weftof wholes, of fragments and resiliency,imperfect music of imperfect spheres,the weediest of stars, the in-betweens.Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in VerseIn our yearning for certainty, we have tried to reduce the cosmos to clockwork, to side with probability over surprise, and yet again and again it is the break in the pattern, the chaos in the order, that creates the conditions for possibility. The most brutal benediction of life is that every experience is unrepeatable, every organism irreplicable, every existence a singular phenomenon that has never before occurred and will never again occur in the entire history and future of the universe — something Rosenberg channels in another poem from the book, reverencing the most poetic of numbers:PRAISE ON PI DAYby Lisa RosenbergTo praise the nonrepeating, I will praisethe universe: each smooth circumference,each jagged fit and fractal-sculpted faceof life and not-life. They’re everywhere you look.The universe, each smooth circumferenceof our daily mess, won’t fit in simple binsof life and not-life. They’re everywhereand elsewhere, too. What surprises us is notour daily mess, unfit for simple bins,but each repeated lesson learned anewand elsewhere, too. What surprises us is notthat we forget, but that our learning shiftswith each repeated lesson learned anew.The aster blooms. The supernova cools.We might forget that all our learning shiftsinto the pupil of the coming day.The aster blooms. The supernova coolsits jagged fit and fractal-sculpted faceinto the pupil of a coming daywhere praise is nonrepeating, and we praise.Couple with another poem of praise for the improbable, then revisit The Universe in Verse.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.