Holding Uncertainty Without Turning Away

A "Sunday Reflections" Series

This week, I was in an Uber when the driver almost hit a man crossing the street. He appeared suddenly, disoriented, stepping into traffic as cars moved quickly around him. The moment passed, but something opened.

The driver shook his head and began speaking about mental health, homelessness, the feeling that things are unraveling. Then he asked a question that felt less intellectual and more human.

“How do we fix this?”

I started with the answers we often reach for. Systems. Policy. Community. Structural change. All important, all true, and yet none of them touched what I sensed he was really asking.

So I paused and spoke from a different place.

I told him that if we only focus on moments of despair, if we only consume the news and the images of collapse, the world begins to look irreparably broken. Darkness becomes the dominant story. Not because it is the only truth, but because it is the loudest.

But when we choose to notice moments of kindness, beauty, and care, something else reveals itself. Not in opposition to suffering, but alongside it. This is not about turning away from pain or injustice. It is about remembering that this is not the only story being told.

Later in the week, I sat with a young child. Bright, expressive, and usually full of life. This time, all I could feel was her fear.

She was approaching the one year anniversary of the LA fires. She was trying to understand the ICE raids and how the people she loves were being affected. Her nights were filled with nightmares. Her days with imagined futures where she was taken away from her family. Her body was holding what her mind could not yet comprehend.

For the first time since I have known her, I could not feel the presence of love moving through her. Not because she is unloved, but because fear had taken up all the space.

I asked her a simple question.

“What is it about sitting in fear that feels like it is serving you?”

She did not have an answer. I did not need her to.

We talked about how the body does not know the difference between what is real and what is imagined. Between the past, the future, and this moment. Whatever the mind rehearses, the body experiences as now.

There was no bow to tie around the conversation. No sudden relief. But there was a shift. An understanding that while she cannot control what happens in the world, she can choose what she holds within herself.

We cannot guarantee safety. We cannot control the external world. All we can do is learn how to find stillness inside ourselves while standing in the midst of uncertainty.

These two moments stay with me. An adult overwhelmed by a broken system. A child overwhelmed by a frightening world. Different lives, same nervous system.

This is the chapter I find myself in now. Not choosing between fear and love. Not denying darkness or chasing light. But learning how to hold both without being pulled apart by either.

This is what unity feels like.

Not certainty.
Not resolution.

But the capacity to remain present, open, and human while everything else feels unknown.