For most of my life I treated uncertainty as a problem with a solution.
Something was unresolved, so the job was to resolve it. Gather more information. Make a plan. Close the open question and move on. The discomfort of not knowing was a signal that work remained, and the work was always some version of reducing the not knowing.
That instinct holds up well on most things. It held up a lot less well this year.
Several open questions, no control over the timing
I knew roughly what was coming into this year, and I knew it would be the defining stretch of it. That part was not a surprise.
Finishing the master’s. Finding a job, and then actually starting it. Moving into my own apartment. Travel scattered through the middle of all of it. And one more personal thing that is still open, which I’ll leave at that.
Any one of those on its own is just a normal thing to have in progress. The problem was the overlap, and more specifically what the overlap exposed: not a single one of them had a timeline I controlled.
A thesis gets reviewed when it gets reviewed. A hiring process moves at the pace of the company running it, not the candidate inside it. Paperwork arrives when the institution producing it gets around to producing it. I could prepare, follow up, apply more widely, and I did all of that. None of it changed the schedule. The dates stayed somebody else’s to set.
That’s a specific kind of discomfort, and it is different from being busy. Busy has a shape. You can work through busy. This was the feeling of several large questions sitting open at the same time while the only honest answer to “when will you know” was that I had no idea.
What was actually available
Once it became clear that nothing I did was going to resolve any of it faster, the only thing left was the present.
I wrote about that in What Keeps Me Steady Right Now, in February, from inside the stretch rather than looking back at it. Reading it now, what strikes me is how little of it is about the future. Movement, simple eating, protected quiet time, regular practice. Upkeep, not strategy. At the time it felt like the unambitious option, the thing you fall back on when you can’t do anything better.
It was the right call, and not because routines are inherently virtuous. It was right because it was the only category of thing that was still mine to decide.
That maps onto a distinction I got to later in The Difference Between Structure and Control. Structure removes a recurring decision. Control tries to remove uncertainty about the future. Everything I was tempted to do in the middle of this year was control: more planning, more contingencies, more scenarios mapped out for outcomes I had no influence over. All of it would have been work. None of it would have been useful. The things that actually held were the plain ones that never pretended to know what was coming.
The shift, and why it took this long
There were smaller versions of this earlier, and I can see now that they were practice.
Preparing to disappear for a month was about accepting that things would continue without me, that some decisions would be made in my absence and some loose ends would stay loose. Switching back to work after a long break was narrower still: starting work again without a valid contract, because a person told me it would be sorted even though the system around him could not confirm it. Both were real, and both were bounded. One month. One contract.
What changed this year was volume. Several unresolved things at once, none of them resolving on schedule, for long enough that waiting stopped being a temporary state I was enduring and became the normal condition I was living in.
That is what moved it from an idea to something I actually believe. Uncertainty is not a problem to solve. It is a condition you operate under. I could have read that sentence a year ago, agreed with it, and understood nothing by it. You don’t get there by deciding to think differently. You get there by spending enough time inside it that the old frame simply stops being usable.
Where it landed
Most of it has resolved by now.
The master’s is done and the certificate has arrived. The job search ended at Orbit, which has its own story and isn’t this one. I moved into my own place at the beginning of August. One thread is still open, and the timing on that one isn’t mine either.
September was comfortably the busiest month of the year. It was also the point at which I noticed I felt genuinely stable for the first time in a long stretch, like a weight I had stopped consciously tracking had come off. That combination is the part I find most interesting. Load did not go down. Open questions did.
The actual point
I don’t think any of this was really about a hard year.
Uncertainty is the main kind of existential discomfort I run into, and I suspect that is true generally. Not failure, not difficulty, not even loss. Just the ordinary state of having things open that matter and not knowing how they go. The year made it loud enough to notice, but it was never specific to the year.
What changed is what I now expect of myself inside it. Not to resolve it faster, and not to feel fine about it either. Just to keep the things that are actually mine running, and let the rest stay open as long as it needs to.
