Life doesn’t come with a guarantee. That’s not a new idea, but it feels newly relevant when the world stops playing by the rules we thought we understood. When the ground under our feet keeps shifting — be it our health, our finances, our relationships, or the systems we rely on — it’s hard not to feel unmoored.
Uncertainty isn’t just a moment; it’s a state of being. A weight. A fog. A lingering question mark that never quite resolves into a full stop.
For me, uncertainty has taken the shape of waiting. Waiting for decisions about funding. Waiting for systems to work or fail. Waiting for the phone to ring with good news, or bad, or nothing at all. The silence becomes its own answer, one that says: "Keep hanging on. We don’t know either."
And in the middle of that ambiguity, life still needs to be lived. Emails need writing. Groceries need buying. Pain needs managing. Resilience is needed with people around us, whether it’s available or not.
There’s an odd sort of intimacy in uncertainty, though. It reveals what truly matters. Who checks in. What we need to function. How we self-soothe. It pulls focus to the tiny certainties: a good coffee, a moment of laughter, a song that still stirs something deep.
We’re not meant to live in survival mode forever. But while we're here, waiting, adapting, recalibrating, it helps to name it. To say out loud: "This is hard."
And it helps, too, to remember we’re not alone in the not-knowing. Uncertainty might isolate us from control, but it can connect us, if we let it, in our shared vulnerability.
So today, I don’t have answers. But I do have this moment. This breath. This small act of writing. And maybe that’s enough for now.
