A Reflection on finding peace when the world feels overwhelming
It seems to me, as I sit here with a cup of Lapsang Souchong curling fragrant smoke into the spring air, that the world has grown rather fond of being loud. The din of opinion, the clatter of ceaseless information, the ever-shifting tide of crises—it all gives the impression that certainty is just around the corner if only we shout a little louder or scroll a little longer. And yet, beneath the fevered pulse of our age, there hums a deeper truth: the world is, and has always been, uncertain. We are merely becoming reacquainted with that ancient companion.
In my youth, I imagined life to be a staircase—each year another riser, another assured step upward into clarity and control. But now, in my middle years, I find it more resembles a misty coastline at dusk. The path is rarely straight, and the familiar landmarks seem to shift their positions when I’m not looking. Recently it as a reflection on the anniversary of my own body’s betrayal—a medical diagnosis, of the sort that causes your physician to adopt a tone somewhere between officious and apologetic—that pulled back the curtain with a jolt. One moment, I was making plans to celebrate the achievement of a colleague, the next, I was reading research articles about treatment options for a condition I didn’t even knew existed, and listening to euphemisms for words that are too blunt to say out loud.
Mortality. There it is. That old, well-mannered spectre that we nod to in passing but rarely invite in for tea. The diagnosis—though not terminal—was enough to make its presence more tangible, more intimately known. Suddenly, every ordinary ache bore the weight of significance. Every calendar date loomed with both promise and dread. But perhaps the most unsettling companion that arrived in the wake of the news was uncertainty.
Not the crisp uncertainty of a multiple-choice exam, but the open-ended, breath-holding kind. The kind where no amount of planning can conjure a guarantee. And I found, to my great dismay, that I had not been taught how to be still in that kind of space. I had been schooled in preparation, in achievement, in making the best of things. But not in the quiet courage of not knowing.
Yet here’s the curious thing: once I stopped resisting uncertainty—once I stopped treating it as a puzzle to solve or a problem to fix—it became less an enemy and more a companion. It is, after all, the same uncertainty that makes love so thrilling, art so moving, and spring so full of expectation. The same space in which anything can go wrong is also the space where everything wonderful begins.
I find myself, these days, lingering more often. A sunrise that might have once been lost behind a screen, now draws me to the window. A conversation with my family, meandering and unhurried, takes precedence over email that can wait. I hug my friends a beat longer. I listen more closely. I allow beauty to stop me mid-stride.
This isn’t to romanticise illness, nor to suggest that suffering is somehow tidy or instructive by nature. It is often neither. But it is a forge. And in its heat, I have found a clearer sense of what matters. Not certainty. Not control. But connection. Presence. The miracle of being here, however briefly, with those we love and the wonders of this world—the sea in its moody grandeur, the trees with their pollen and cardinals, the laughter over a shared meal.
We may never grow entirely comfortable with uncertainty. But we can, I think, grow intimate with it. We can learn to walk beside it, trusting that while we cannot chart the whole course, we can still live fully in the steps we take today.
And perhaps that is enough. More than enough.
