I understand this one when I think about how uncomfortable it is to be in the middle of something I can’t explain.
Not knowing what someone feels. Not knowing how something will turn out. Not knowing what the next season of life is going to look like. Not knowing why something happened at all.
Those are the moments when my mind gets busy.
Very busy.
Because if I can’t find meaning, I’ll usually make some.
And fear is more than happy to help.
A relationship feels uncertain, so I decide I’m going to lose it. Something changes with my health, and my mind skips straight past the information I actually have and starts writing a future. My child is going through something difficult, and suddenly I’m imagining consequences ten years from now.
There is a reason uncertainty feels so threatening.
If I don’t know what something means, I don’t know how to control it.
And I like control more than I sometimes care to admit.
I like knowing where I stand. I like knowing what happens next. I like having a plan and then watching life cooperate with that plan, which is adorable considering how little evidence life has ever given me that this arrangement is available.
Still, I try.
And when the usual meanings start falling away—when I can’t confidently say this is good, this is bad, this proves this, this means that—fear can move into the empty space very quickly.
At least a frightening story gives me something to hold onto.
If I decide someone is pulling away, I can prepare myself.
If I decide this setback means I’m failing, I can start fixing myself.
If I decide the future is going badly, I can rehearse it over and over in the hope that somehow worrying will make me ready.
None of that actually brings peace, but it does give me the feeling that I’m doing something.
And sometimes I think I confuse doing something with being safe.
What I’m starting to see is that there may be another way to meet the space where I don’t know.
I don’t have to fill it with fear.
That sounds simple. It isn’t.
When I’m scared, fear feels responsible. It says, Someone needs to think about everything that could go wrong around here.
And apparently it has volunteered.
But fear is not especially imaginative. It tends to recycle the same few stories: you’ll be left, you’ll lose something, you won’t be okay, you’re not enough, you should have prevented this.
Different day, same script.
So maybe the practice isn’t to force a positive meaning onto whatever is happening. That would still be me insisting that I know.
Maybe I can let myself not know for a minute.
Not know what this delay means.
Not know why this person is behaving this way.
Not know what this change will become.
Not know whether the thing I’m afraid of will happen.
And instead of treating that uncertainty as dangerous, maybe I can become a little quieter inside it.
That is a very different experience from trying to solve the future.
It also asks me to trust something I’m not always good at trusting: that peace does not have to wait until I have all the answers.
I can take the next sensible step without knowing the whole outcome. I can ask a question. Make the appointment. Have the conversation. Look at the facts. Set the boundary.
And then stop.
I don’t have to create the rest.
That feels especially important when my mind starts racing ahead. Fear always wants more information than this moment actually contains.
Sometimes the answer may be both.
But even seeing the difference gives me somewhere to stand.
I may not know what this moment means yet.
And perhaps I don’t need to.
For today, maybe it’s enough to stop letting fear be the first one to decide.