Agency without certainty
We are wired to seek certainty. It is part of our survival instinct to seek safety.
And yet, many of our most creative responses arise from a willingness to pause and lean into the simple space of:
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know” is not an end, but a beginning.
It is an invitation to stop limiting our ability to act by relying only on what we already know, on our habitual thinking, and on downloading answers from the past.
As Maria Popova writes:
“Our task here is not to be certain but to be true”
— Maria Popova, How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life
When we get out of our heads and reconnect with ourselves, each other and the natural world, a different kind of response becomes possible.
We move towards coherence: a state in which what we think, feel, value and do are more deeply aligned.
Our agency lies not only in what we know, but in our complex humanity and our coherent, embodied presence.
This is the birthplace of wisdom.
Intelligence without wisdom may be one of the great dangers of our time.
Wisdom asks something more of us: wholeness, connection, coherence, insight, and the capacity for creative, courageous action aligned with our deepest values, even when we cannot know the outcome.
One of the great questions of our time, then, is how to live and act in an uncertain and fragile world.
Next week, I will be joined by a group of extraordinary humans to explore exactly this at our next Courageous Conversations: What keeps us moving?
What keeps us acting when we care deeply about something, but cannot know or control the outcome?
What role do agency, hope and action play in uncertain times?
And perhaps most importantly, what becomes possible when we don’t try to navigate these questions alone?
What role might community, spirituality, solidarity and collective action play?
There may be no neat answers.
But there will be connection, collective rumbling and emergence.
And that is precisely the point.