On Certainty
In November 1969, thirteen-year-old Paul Gilmore was sailing with his family from the UK to Melbourne aboard the liner Fairstar. One thousand miles from Fremantle, he tossed a bottle containing a note into the vast Indian Ocean. On it was the date, his location, and a simple ask: whoever finds this, please reply.
Of course, he had no idea if anyone ever would.
That was the whole point.
Fifty years later, another thirteen-year-old boy, Jyah Elliott, was fishing with his father on Talia Beach in South Australia when he found it. They had to break the bottle to preserve the note inside. All those years later, it was still legible, still waiting to be answered.
Paul Gilmore told the BBC he had always hoped a letter would come back one day.
What made that hope possible wasn’t certainty or a guarantee of success. The hope survived because of the not knowing.
Somewhere along the way, uncertainty became something we set out to eliminate. We do our due diligence and call it being prepared and dress responsibility up as wisdom. But behind all of that planning and predicting, there is something we rarely appreciate – the cost of the quest for certainty that never truly arrives.
The moment a plan is fully formed, your imagination switches off. When you think you know someone completely, it’s easy to take that person for granted. Certainty closes the space where possibility opens up. It answers questions before you’ve had the chance to wonder if you’ve even asked the right ones.
The writer, sitting with a blank page, doesn’t know whether her next sentence will be any good. The person who says ‘I love you’ first isn’t sure of getting the response they hoped for. The entrepreneur who starts something new doesn’t know if their idea will work. None of them has outrun uncertainty. They’ve simply found a way to stop treating it as the enemy.
It turns out that not knowing is a necessary part of being alive in the world. But we are so busy trying to eliminate uncertainty that we miss who we are becoming because we’ve lived through it.
A boy launches a message in a bottle precisely because he doesn’t know what will happen next. Not knowing is part of the adventure.
We are all, in our own way, casting bottles into the unknown every day. The courage to do that, to take a chance on a future we can’t yet see, is what makes us human.
Thank you for the reminder, Bernadette. Amid all my uncertainty I remain hopeful often enough to feel alive, at least sometimes.
Hi Bernadette,
I wanted to thank you for your recent note about the boy who cast a bottle into the Indian Ocean and the reply that arrived fifty years later. It made me smile.
I’ve been thinking and writing about hope lately — especially how thin and performative the word can sometimes feel in the middle of relentless news cycles and collective anxiety. Your story reminded me of something I'd almost forgotten: that hope doesn’t live in certainty at all. It lives in the space we leave open when we don’t know what will happen next.
There was something quietly beautiful about the image of that bottle drifting through half a century of uncertainty before finding its reader. It felt like a small metaphor for the kinds of things many of us are doing right now, casting words, ideas, and conversations into the world without any guarantee of where they might land.
Your piece buoyed my spirits today at just the right time. Thank you.
Warmly,
Don