“I sent word to Nestor at Pylos but he had no certain knowledge of your fate . . . Where are you now, where do you delay?”
Ovid, Heroides
Penelope to Odysseus

Penelope waits for Odysseus, and waiting means not to know and to doubt.

“Am I in love?” Roland Barthes asks in his Lover’s Discourse.

Part of waiting is not knowing.

Barthes answers: “The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

Loving a person and life means embracing uncertainty. One can prepare, managing what one controls, but to live and love means not knowing.