I remember saying it one evening, half in frustration and half in desperation. “I just want clarity,” I said. “I just want to know how things will turn out. Why can’t life be a little more predictable?”
He smiled — not mockingly, but with the kind of quiet compassion that comes from having wrestled with the same question himself. “Because,” he said gently, “if life became predictable, it would no longer be life.”
That sentence stayed with me. He went on to explain something that, in hindsight, feels obvious, yet we spend our lives resisting it.
“Uncertainty,” he said, “is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.”
I had always treated uncertainty as a problem to be solved — something temporary, something that needed fixing. He was telling me that uncertainty is not a bug; it is a feature.
“When people try too hard to eliminate uncertainty,” he continued, “they don’t become more secure. They become superstitious.”
That surprised me.
He explained that when we cannot tolerate not knowing, we start inventing patterns, predictions, and false certainties. We start believing that if we think hard enough, worry enough, or plan obsessively enough, we can somehow control life itself.
But life resists that control. “Life,” he said, “cannot be made fully predictable. Not by intelligence. Not by morality. Not even by sincerity.”
Even the most righteous person lives inside uncertainty. Even the most careless person does too.
That was strangely comforting.
I had unconsciously believed that being morally good should somehow earn me predictability, stability, immunity from surprise. He was reminding me that goodness does not buy certainty — it buys meaning.
“This world,” he said, “is not designed to reward people with predictability. It is designed to test them with uncertainty.”
That reframed everything.
It meant that my discomfort was not a sign that something was wrong — it was a sign that I was inside the human condition.
He said something else that shifted my inner posture. “Trying to remove uncertainty is not where peace lies,” he said. “Peace lies in learning how to stand inside uncertainty without collapsing.”
I thought about how often my mind runs ahead of reality. What if this happens? What if that goes wrong? What if I lose this? What if I fail there?
He called this living in the “circle of concerns” — a space where thoughts may feel important but yield no actionable outcomes. “These thoughts,” he said, “feel urgent, but they are useless.”
Strong words, but painfully accurate.
He didn’t deny that such thoughts appear. He acknowledged that they will appear. “Triggers are not in your control,” he said. “What is in your control is how long you follow them.”
That was liberating.
I could not stop thoughts from arising — but I could choose whether to host them.
He gave me a practical mental rule: “The moment you realize that a thought is about what you cannot control, stop. Don’t argue with it. Don’t chase it. Just step back.”
I tried it.
The first few times, the thoughts returned quickly. But something changed: they stopped becoming the center of my attention. They moved to the background. Not gone — but no longer ruling.
Then he said something that made me smile, because it was both ordinary and profound. “Do you remember when, as children, we had to get an injection?”
Of course I did.
“All morning,” he said, “we — my siblings and I — remained anxious. And then it happened in ten seconds. But we had already suffered for hours.”
I laughed — and immediately stopped. Because that is exactly how I still live. Suffering repeatedly in imagination for something that might not even happen.
He wasn’t asking me to stop caring. He was asking me to stop multiplying suffering. “There is a difference,” he said, “between being concerned and being preoccupied.”
Concern keeps you responsible. Preoccupation makes you helpless.
He reminded me that even within uncertainty, there is a great deal I can do. I can seek good counsel. I can prepare reasonably. I can act ethically. I can support others. I can regulate my reactions. I can choose where my attention lives. “All of that,” he said, “is within your domain.”
What lies outside my domain — outcomes, timings, final results — belongs to God.
And paradoxically, trusting that does not make me passive. It makes me focused. Because I stop wasting energy where it has no effect and start investing it where it does.
He concluded with a line I often repeat to myself now, especially when anxiety begins to tighten its grip. “Uncertainty will not go away,” he said. “But your relationship with it can mature.”
And perhaps that is the real growth. Not when life becomes safer — but when I become steadier inside its unpredictability. Not when the world becomes controllable — but when I become conscious about my domain and God’s control.
Because peace does not come from controlling the unknown. It comes from learning how to stand wisely, while not knowing.
