Certainty Is the Cage: Learning to Dance in the Fog

I hit a wall this week. Not of stone, but of fog.

I struggled to move forward.

I told myself I was "strategizing." I told myself I was "gathering data." I wasn't. I was scared of making a move without a guarantee of the outcome. Yes, I do this work daily, and the fears still show up, as if on queue.

You know that feeling.

The paralysis of the blank page. The hesitation before the difficult conversation. You want the map before you enter the woods. You want to know it ends well before you begin.

I realized I was demanding certainty from a world that only offers probability.

I dug into why. Why is the unknown so physically painful?

Stephen Porges explains through Polyvagal Theory that our nervous system constantly scans for safety. To a primitive brain, "unknown" equals "predator." Ambiguity isn't just an intellectual puzzle. It is a physiological threat.

My body was yelling "unsafe" simply because I couldn't see the horizon.

Then I looked at the history of this feeling.

The poet John Keats called the antidote "Negative Capability." He defined it as the capacity to be in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

I was doing the reaching. Irritably. Desperately.

I went back to the Journey of Uncertainty. I reread the encounter between Ritt and the Giant, Tawa.

It hit me hard.

Tawa is cloaked in feathers, shifting like the dawn. Tawa holds a compass. But the compass never points north. It spins. It refuses to settle.

Ritt wants direction. Ritt wants the spinning to stop.

Tawa laughs. Tawa vanishes and reappears, dancing into the danger.

"Certainty is the cage," Tawa says. "Curiosity is the key."

I sat with that.

I have been building my own cage. I thought the walls were protecting me. They were just blocking the light.

Nassim Taleb writes about "Antifragility." He describes systems that don't just survive chaos but actually get better because of it. A candle blows out in the wind. A fire gets stronger.

I was trying to be a candle. Shielding my little flame.

Tawa teaches Ritt that the map you need will only appear once you take the first step. Not before. The ground hardens under your foot the moment you place it there.

The etymology of uncertainty comes from the Latin certus, meaning "determined, fixed." To be uncertain is to be unfixed. To be fluid.

That is not a weakness. It is a superpower.

The reframe transforming my life right now is this: Safety is not the absence of fog. Safety is the trust in my ability to navigate it.

I don't need the compass to stop spinning. I need to learn to dance while it spins.

This is my work today.

Where are you demanding a map when you simply need to take a step?

Follow for more of the work.

I write more about this in The Journeys of Uncertainty and Nurture from the 12 Journeys framework.

#fyp #uncertainty #antifragile #growthmindset #mindfulness #courage