The Gift of not knowing

There are periods of life when almost nothing is seriously wrong, and yet almost nothing feels settled. I have known that feeling for most of my life. Uncertainty has followed me in many forms - where I would live, what my work would become, whether years of effort would eventually produce what I imagined they could, whether the people beside me would remain there, whether the life I could see so clearly in my mind would ever become something I could actually touch. Stability and certainty are different things, of course, but for long stretches of my life, I lacked both. What I never lacked was vision. I have rarely known what was going to happen, but I have almost always known what I wanted to move toward.

We tend to treat uncertainty as something temporary, a space between where we are and the moment when life finally makes sense. Once the contract is signed, the money is there, the relationship is secure, the opportunity arrives - then we will know. But no one has the gift of knowing. Perhaps stability simply makes us forget that. A salary can make tomorrow feel predictable. A home can make permanence feel tangible. A calendar filled months in advance can make those months feel as though they somehow belong to us. They do not. The person with a carefully constructed five-year plan lives inside the unknown just as much as the person who has no idea where they will be six months from now. One simply has more structure surrounding the uncertainty.

I have had to become comfortable there, though I would never call myself fearless. Fear is real. I have questioned myself, wondered whether I was making the right decision, whether I had miscalculated, whether I was chasing something that would never arrive. But fear has rarely become indecision. I have never needed to know that something would work in order to believe deeply enough that it could.

Maybe that is because vision was never supposed to be a prediction. It was a compass. A compass cannot tell you what you will encounter, how long the journey will take, who will walk beside you, what you will lose along the way, or whether the destination will resemble what you imagined when you began. It can only give you a direction. Perhaps that is enough.

I think we spend an extraordinary amount of our lives waiting for permission from the future. We want assurance that the risk will be worth taking before we take it. We want to know the relationship will last before surrendering ourselves to loving someone. We want proof that the work will matter before giving years of ourselves to it. We want to know we will succeed before allowing ourselves to begin. But the future remains silent. It has always been silent. Eventually, you have to decide whether you require an answer from it before you are willing to live.

I do not anymore.

There are still things in my life today that I cannot answer. Important things. Things I think about when everything becomes quiet. There are plans that are not yet plans, conversations that may change things, opportunities that may materialize or disappear, places I imagine calling home, work whose ultimate shape I cannot yet see, and people I hope remain part of whatever comes next.

I don't know.

Those three words once sounded like an admission of weakness to me. Now they feel remarkably honest.

I don't know. Neither do you. Neither does anyone.

Maybe there is freedom in admitting that. Not in abandoning direction, but in no longer demanding that the future reveal itself before we decide how to live. So perhaps the question was never, “What is going to happen?” Perhaps it is simply, “What do I believe in enough to move toward anyway?”

Maybe accepting that does not diminish the importance of planning, discipline, commitment, or ambition. It quite possibly makes them more meaningful. Choosing something when the outcome is guaranteed requires very little faith. Choosing it when nothing has promised you that it will work is something else entirely. That is where belief lives - somewhere between what we can see and what we cannot yet prove.

I have spent much of my life there. Strangely, despite the instability, despite the questions, despite all the times I genuinely had no idea what was happening, I have never felt completely directionless. I could still see something ahead of me. Not perfectly, not literally, and certainly not as a prophecy of what my life would become. Just a vision. Enough to take another step, and then another.

Maybe that is all any of us have ever been doing - walking toward something we believe in without knowing exactly what waits for us there. We call it uncertainty as though it is an interruption to life, some temporary condition we are meant to endure until the answers finally arrive. But perhaps uncertainty is not the space between one life and another. Perhaps it is the space in which our lives are actually being lived.

Maybe certainty was never what I was looking for.

Maybe I only wanted enough belief to keep walking without it.

Maybe you do too.

Dino