How to lean into the uncertainty
"Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security." – John Allen Paulos
We spend extraordinary energy trying to eliminate uncertainty from our lives. We create five-year plans and retirement portfolios. We seek guarantees and insurance.
All in service of the illusion that we can know what's coming and control what happens next.
There is wisdom in preparation.
Beneath our planning often lies something less productive: a deep discomfort with the fundamental uncertainty that is the only true constant of being alive.
What if, instead of struggling against this uncertainty, we could learn to breathe into it? To let go of the particular grip we maintain on how things "should" unfold? To lean, however tentatively, into the not-knowing that defines our actual condition?
The breath comes first. Not as a metaphor but as a literal practice. When uncertainty rises, whether as anxiety about a medical test, concern about a relationship's future, or worry about a decision's outcome, the body responds. The breath shallows. The shoulders tighten. The mind races.
In these moments, the deliberate breath serves as an anchor. Not to eliminate uncertainty, but to create space for a different relationship with it.
Then comes the letting go, not of appropriate action or responsible choice, but of the particular kind of tensing against reality that characterises so much of our relationship with uncertainty. We release the belief that security comes from controlling outcomes rather than from developing capacity to meet whatever arrives.
This letting go isn't passive resignation. It's a clear-eyed recognition of what we can and cannot control and a deliberate release of the energy we waste fighting the latter.
And finally, the leaning in. Not because uncertainty is comfortable; it rarely is, but because moving toward what we fear often reveals it as less terrible than our avoidance suggested. When we lean into uncertainty, we discover our own resilience.
Maybe what we don't know contains not just potential threats but potential gifts.
Control is largely an illusion; many of our efforts to control outcomes give us the feeling of security without the reality.
Resilience comes from practice; we build capacity for uncertainty by willingly entering it in small doses.
Peace exists independent of certainty; true equanimity doesn't require knowing what comes next.
The invitation isn't to abandon planning or to stop seeking knowledge. It's to hold these activities within a larger context of fundamental not-knowing, to pursue them without the desperate grip that comes from believing our safety depends on their success.
Take a breath. Let go. Lean in. Not once, but again and again, as a practice of living with the uncertainty that no amount of planning will ever fully eliminate.