Standing Within Uncertainty

On awakening the deepest capacities of life itself

I recently wrote a reflection on my Blog titled A Place to Stand. It was a more poetic meditation on listening, belonging, and remaining human in polarized times. But earlier this week, at the early hour of 3:00 AM, I woke up thinking about the idea of “a place to stand” from a different angle.

I found myself reflecting on the phrase primordial uncertainty.

At its most basic level, life is uncertain. This is not a temporary condition to overcome; it is part of the structure of existence itself. We cannot eliminate uncertainty because life itself is uncertain.

Later that morning, I spent some time exploring the origins of the phrase. I first encountered it years ago, though the idea itself clearly reaches much further back philosophically. Martin Heidegger spoke of primordial anxiety and the uncertainty inherent in Being itself. Paul Tillich explored anxiety, courage, and groundlessness in The Courage to Be. Later, Rollo May described existential anxiety as inseparable from human freedom and responsibility.

As I reflected on all of this, I could suddenly see my own life more clearly.

If I look back at myself in the 1990s, I would say that much of my anxiety had become neurotic. What I can recognize now is that I was constantly trying to make life simple.

But underneath that effort to make life manageable was something deeper.

I was trying to create certainty.

I was afraid of what might happen next.
Afraid of making the wrong choice.
Afraid of uncertainty itself.

And so much of my suffering came from trying to stand on something that could never fully hold me.

Because life does not offer certainty.

So where can we stand?

What can we stand on, if anything at all?

This morning, I realized that perhaps the only real “place to stand” is not certainty about life, but a commitment to who we choose to be, and how we choose to respond, within life’s uncertainty.

We may not control outcomes.
We may not know what comes next.
But we do have a say in how we meet the moment.

In that sense, a stand is something generative and creative.

It is a declaration of who we are choosing to become.

For example:
I may choose to stand for loving-kindness.
Or courage.
Or compassion.
Or to awaken the deepest capacities of life itself.

But making such a declaration is only the beginning.

The deeper challenge is living it.

To say I stand for loving-kindness means I must continually return to loving-kindness, especially when I fail at it. There will inevitably be moments when I fall out of alignment with my own values — moments of reactivity, fear, defensiveness, or avoidance.

Integrity, then, is not perfection.

Integrity is the willingness to notice when we are no longer living in alignment with our word, to acknowledge it honestly, to repair what needs repairing, and then to recommit ourselves again.

I can also recognize this movement in my relationship to writing itself.

For years, I hesitated to share my writing publicly. Looking back, I can see how much of that hesitation was driven by a desire for certainty — reassurance that what I wrote would be accepted, appreciated, or understood.

But lately something has begun to shift.

I am becoming more willing to write without needing certainty about how it will be received. Less concerned with perfection. Less preoccupied with approval.

Writing is beginning to feel less like performance and more like practice.

More like a mirror reflecting how I am learning to be in the world.

And perhaps that, too, is part of learning how to stand within uncertainty.

Perhaps this is part of what it means to be human.

Not standing on certainty,
but standing within uncertainty,
while continually returning to what we most deeply value.

Perhaps this is also part of why polarized times become so emotionally charged. Certainty can feel safer than ambiguity, even when that certainty hardens us against one another.

Life has always been uncertain.
And it always will be.

But even in the face of that uncertainty, there may still be a place to stand.

Not on certainty,
but in the ongoing practice of standing within uncertainty and awakening the deepest capacities of life itself.