A professor of statistics explains that living is about taking risks and not knowing the outcome, and why it’s important to accept and embrace that

My father was an enthusiastic traveller, but as he got older he increasingly suffered from what he called “travel fever”, a vivid term for the acute anxiety felt before a journey, essentially due to uncertainty about all the things that could go wrong. Sadly, this eventually stopped him from going on holiday. Then I, too, started to suffer similar apprehension, so I consulted a psychotherapist. She recommended a small piece of cognitive behavioural therapy, which involved acknowledging the mental and physical symptoms of anxiety, but telling myself that these were essentially indistinguishable from feelings of excitement about the prospect of a journey. This reframing of my feelings has been reasonably effective – it’s one way of dealing with uncertainty.

It’s not just the uncertainty of travel that we all have to face. None of us knows what is going to happen, or what is currently going on outside our immediate knowledge, or the vast majority of what has happened in the past. Uncertainty has been called the “conscious awareness of ignorance”, and there is a lot we are ignorant about.