embracing uncertainty

Apr 23

Dear Reader,

Someone asked me last week how to know if they should stay in their job or leave. They'd been sitting with this question for months, going back and forth, asking everyone they knew for advice. Every time they got close to a decision, something new would come up and they'd be back to not knowing. They wanted me to help them find certainty, and I had to tell them I couldn't give them that. In fact, nobody could.

I've been thinking about how much effort we put into trying to make uncertainty go away. We keep looking for more information, waiting for some clear sign that we're making the right choice. But that kind of certainty rarely shows up for the bigger decisions we face, and we exhaust ourselves waiting for it.

I've sat with a lot of people through uncertainty, and what seems to make it unbearable isn't just the not knowing itself. It feels like we should have figured it out by now, like not having an answer means we're doing something wrong. We treat uncertainty like a problem to solve instead of a reality to live inside while we figure things out.

I keep wondering what it would mean to intentionally embrace uncertainty instead of just trying to eliminate it. To say "I don't know how this will turn out" and make a choice anyway. To accept that no amount of research delivers the certainty we are looking for, and to choose a direction anyway.

Uncertainty doesn't disappear when you stop fighting it. But the paralysis might.

Yours in the journey,