By Dina Aldabbagh

There’s a word in Spanish — “previsible” — that means predictable. If it’s pre-visible, it’s predictable. We often want something new to happen, but struggle to cope with uncertainty. We think that uncertainty might just result in what we’ve always seen — but that’s not true. The very nature of it being uncertain means that it’s something new. If it is visible from where you are now, that means it’s something to be expected — i.e. nothing new. However if it’s not pre-visible, then it’s not foreseeable — it’s uncertain. That’s actually what we want.

Our human condition is that we want something new and better for our lives, but we don’t want uncertainty. That just can’t happen. If it’s new, then by nature it’s not something you’ve seen before. It can’t be visible from here because it’s not predictable. Unfortunately the weight we put on ourselves when we face uncertainty often causes us to turn around. We equate uncertainty with unsafety, which registers in our nervous systems as “bad.” So we find ourselves in this loop where we want new things, but we always do everything we can to take away the uncertainty. We try to overthink and logic it all out, because maybe if we can think through the situation then we won’t be caught by surprise and that uncertainty won’t endanger us. 

Our self imposed stress about the unknown drives us to overthink or try and control things through means of anxious action in an attempt to gain some sense of security, but both of these approaches only make things worse. If you haven’t yet noticed from life, people and things don’t want to be controlled. Everything wants some semblance of agency. Your attempt to control things only exacerbates situations — it drives people to a corner where they must choose an extreme. Yes, it’s true — if you give people and things the freedom to go the way they naturally want to go, then you may not get what you’re hoping for from them. But let me emphasize the concept of nonresistance: if they don’t want to give it to you, they were never going to anyway, no matter how much force you exerted. 

The high pressure ecosystem we create for ourselves every time we want to do something new — and therefore uncertain — is exactly the thing that deters us from trying again. If every time you want to do something new, you torture yourself with worry, doubt, and overthinking your fears, then the natural inclination will be to stop doing new things. They say, “The devil you know is better than the one you don’t” — it’s funny, actually. This mindset is commonly believed, but it frames the “one you don’t know” as also a devil. Perhaps it’s an angel, you just can’t see it yet. But you already know that the current thing is the “devil” — what you don’t want — so that should inform you to change, not to stay the same. However it’s this preconceived notion that what you don’t know is somehow worse than what you do that motivates staying with something that makes you unhappy rather than taking the leap into the unknown. You don’t know that — that’s why it’s “uncertain.”

May I suggest to you that you’ll cross that bridge when you get to it. The same tools in which you utilize to meet today, you will employ tomorrow as well. You don’t need every future thing to be visible right now, you just need to trust you’ll be able to handle whatever tomorrow holds — whether that’s excellence or tragedy. 

There comes a certain anxiety in trying to do everything at once; we realize how much there is to do and we feel paralyzed. Maybe you’re not supposed to have that much perspective at this moment. Maybe for this moment, there is exactly one thing you’re supposed to do, or a few things — and that’s all. That’s where your focus is supposed to be concentrated. If it’s uncertain, it’s not for you to think about. 

This is where trust comes into play. Believing in something larger than you, I’ve found, is the key to allowing yourself to let go of the thread at a certain point. No one is saying “Don’t do anything,” but you have to know what is your part to do, and what is God’s part. Or, more secularly, the part of other people. You don’t exist in this world in a vacuum. When you apply for school, there’re two main prongs at play to get the job done of admitting you. First, you must create all the application materials, fill out the application, pay the fee, and apply. Second, the admissions team must review your application and admit you. There’s a process at play with various elements. Therefore: it’s not all on you. 

Knowing what’s your part and knowing where your control ends is key. Yes, it is fully on you to submit the application — but you can’t admit yourself into the same school you’re applying for. That’s the uncertainty bit that we hate so much — but if we want to grow, it’s unavoidable. You could choose to not apply to school and therefore not risk rejection into their admissions, risk bad grades later, risk bad roommates, risk being a broke college student, risk not getting an internship in the summer, and risk not getting a job after graduation — or, you can take it step by step and trust that when the time comes, you’ll meet the moment. 

I understand the fear of venturing out into unmapped territory — I do. I understand the love of foresight and seeing the big picture and understanding the path ahead and grasping what steps you need to take to get there. There is safety in the future. There is a sense of stabilization in the clarity of what’s to come. Foresight is a kind friend and even the most beautiful codependency.  

There is safety in the future because you’re not actually facing it. You’re working towards it and getting the emotional fulfillment of progression — which is necessary — but here’s a sneaky little concept that’s both scary and relieving: if you don’t have foresight of what’s to  come, you’ve already arrived to the future you sought out and now you’re supposed to be here. 

Foresight is an incredible tool to grow us up. When you see the vision of what’s right for you, you have something tangible to work towards. When the carrot dangles in front of you, without even realizing it you’re climbing the ladder up to a new horizon. You don’t realize it because all you see is the distance between you and the carrot. And then suddenly…the carrot disappears. What was the goal in your head is no longer in your sight; you don’t see it. This whole time you were working towards the visible carrot and didn’t even realize how far you’ve come. 

Now my challenge for you is that perhaps the carrot was never the point — it was just the face of your hope. It was just tangible enough for you to work towards so that you’d arrive at the place you actually needed to be. And perhaps letting go of the carrot isn’t losing sight, but rather regaining presence. You see, there’s so much work to be done in growing you up to be the kind of person who has the carrot — you have to internalize your sense of being worthy of the carrot. You have to become the kind of person who can have the carrot. Once you do that — once you grow up — the carrot loses its necessity as the placeholder of the life you want to live. 

This feels disorienting because for so long, you were working towards this tangible thing — not realizing that you were really just working to grow up into this version of yourself — and losing the face of what you worked towards feels like losing the face of safety. But let me tell you: you’re not losing the life you’ve been working towards, you’re just letting go of the comfort object your psyche was using to visualize your future. When you no longer need the comfort object that drives you forward to the future, you know you’ve arrived. 

A lack of foresight and an abundance of uncertainty is not a signal of being lost, it’s a signal of being here. You don’t realize that the future you’ve been working towards is the land you stand on now — because the present always feels utterly normal. It’s no less miraculous, but by the time it gets to you, it feels mundane. 

When I moved to Madrid, I had this vision of the apartment I’d live in. Everything I saw in my search was just not it and I kept waiting and waiting until I found that “perfect” place. It got to the point that I associated the place with a certain emotional experience I thought I was supposed to have upon seeing it. I thought “I’d know it when it came across me because it’ll feel miraculous and wonderful.” I had envisioned my life in my Madrileño apartment so long in the months before moving out there — I expected that feeling.

However when I finally found the apartment I moved into, I didn’t feel wonder. I did feel a certain hominess and resonance that I didn’t feel at any other place, but it didn’t feel like the miracle I expected. I almost let it go, thinking my perfect apartment was still out there. Unfortunately after five weeks of staying in hotels, hostels, and Airbnb’s, I was exhausted, and I actually cried when I realized I’d “have to” move into that place. 

The funny thing is that this exact apartment that I did move into in Madrid was the miracle I wanted. After living there briefly I realized it was everything I dreamed of when I imagined myself out there. It wasn’t perfect in the holistic sense of flawlessness but it was perfect for what I needed. It nourished the exact life I wanted to live in Madrid. My stress came from not understanding that by the time you reach the miracle, it doesn’t feel miraculous. Because it’s been normalized for you. All that time you were chasing the carrot you didn’t realize that you were actually training your nervous system to accept that reality as normal for you. So when you get to that moment, if you’re expecting it to feel miraculous, you might miss it. It just feels normal. 

It never looks like what you expected it to when you first meet it because we’re always expecting it to look like a miracle, and what we receive is normalcy. For so long, the future felt so big to us, but by the time we’re grown up enough to handle it, it feels proportionate. That doesn’t make it any less wonderful, just less destabilizing. 

When you lose the foresight of what’s your next step and things feel very unclear, it’s because this present moment is the exact home in which you get what’s right for you. If you can understand that the carrot was always just the tool to get you here and now you’re at a place where you’re meant to live in the present moment, you can remove your safety’s dependence on foresight.

When you lose foresight, it’s because you don’t know what’s coming — which means it’s bigger than your current imagination can fill in. And it makes complete sense that you’re afraid because your nervous system goes: “If I can’t imagine it, how can I trust it?” But if you could imagine it now then it wouldn’t be an upgrade. It’d just be a variation of your past. Your fear is actually evidence you’re going in the right direction and you’re only scared because the life you’ve grown into is unprecedented, unpatterned, unreferenced, unfamiliar, outside of what you’ve seen before, and therefore uncertain. When you can’t see how things are going to turn out, it’s because something new is happening — you’re unable to reference your old patterns to recognize the present. 

When things are uncertain it doesn’t mean they’re bad, it just means that they’re larger than the identity you used to live from. Of course, this doesn’t make it any less scary until you see your “future” standing right in front of you, but if you can perspectivize uncertainty to mean growth and not danger, then that future you wanted for yourself will become your very ordinary present. Your uncertainty is the sign that the future you wanted is now present.