Sitting with Uncertainty

By Priya

Last autumn, I was sitting on a park bench with a cold coffee in my hands, staring at my phone. I had two job offers in front of me. One was stable, predictable, the kind of thing you’re supposed to want. The other was messier, less certain, but it made something in my chest feel awake. I must have opened and closed those two emails thirty times that afternoon, locking my phone and taking another sip of coffee that had gone bitter before starting the whole cycle again.

I wanted someone to just tell me. Give me the answer. Make the uncertainty go away.

The need to know

We live in a world that rewards decisiveness. People who “know what they want” are admired. Hesitation is treated like a weakness. The pressure to have a plan, to know exactly where you’re headed, starts young and never really lets up.

I grew up in a household where questions were expected to have answers. If you couldn’t decide, you made a list of pros and cons and picked the logical winner. There wasn’t much room for “I don’t know yet, and that’s okay.” Sitting with uncertainty felt like laziness, or worse, like failure.

So I developed a habit of rushing toward conclusions. Any conclusion. Even a wrong answer felt better than no answer, because at least it was something solid to stand on.

What we lose when we rush

There’s a cost to that kind of urgency, though it doesn’t show up right away. When you always leap toward the first available answer, you miss the things that only reveal themselves slowly. The subtle shifts in how you feel about something over the course of a week. The quiet signals your body sends when something isn’t right, which arrive too late because you’ve already moved on.

I think about it like trying to see stars in the city. The light pollution is so constant that you forget the stars are even there. Rushing toward certainty is its own kind of light pollution. It drowns out the quieter, slower knowing that lives underneath.

Some of the most important truths I’ve found came not from deciding, but from waiting. Not passive, checked-out waiting. The kind where you stay present with the discomfort and let the situation breathe.

Finding tarot in the fog

I discovered tarot during one of those foggy stretches. I was between apartments, between relationships, between versions of myself. Everything felt suspended, and I hated it. A friend suggested I try a reading, and honestly, I went in expecting to be told what to do.

What I got instead was an invitation to sit with exactly the uncertainty I was trying to escape.

The reading didn’t hand me answers. It reflected back the questions I was already carrying but hadn’t been willing to look at directly. It was like someone holding up a mirror in a dark room and saying, “You don’t need to see everything right now. Just notice what’s here.” That reframing planted a seed in me.

I started to see that the in-between space wasn’t empty. It was full of things I hadn’t noticed because I was too busy trying to get through it. Feelings that needed processing, old stories I kept telling myself, quiet desires I’d been ignoring.

Learning to stay

The practice of sitting with uncertainty is exactly that: a practice. It doesn’t come naturally, at least not in a culture that treats speed and certainty as virtues. But I’ve been working at it, in small ways, for a while now.

Sometimes it looks like pausing before responding to a text that triggers a strong reaction. Sometimes it’s telling someone, “I need more time to think about that.” Sometimes it’s as simple as pulling a tarot card in the morning and letting whatever comes up just sit with me through the day, without needing to interpret it or act on it.

The discomfort doesn’t disappear. I still feel that pull toward resolution, that voice that says, “Just pick something, anything.” But I’ve learned to recognize it for what it is. Not wisdom. Anxiety dressed up as productivity.

Real knowing, the kind that settles into your bones, rarely arrives on demand. It comes when you stop grasping and start listening.

The wisdom of not yet

I did eventually choose one of those job offers. It took me almost two weeks, and during that time I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin. But when the clarity came, it wasn’t fireworks. It was more like a gentle settling. One morning I woke up and just knew. Not because I’d analyzed it to death, but because I’d given myself enough space to feel what I actually wanted.

That’s the thing about uncertainty. It’s not the absence of wisdom. Often, it’s wisdom in progress. The answer is forming somewhere below the surface, but it needs time and stillness to take shape.

So if you’re in one of those in-between places right now, where nothing is clear and everything feels suspended, I want to ask you something. What if you didn’t need to figure it out today? What if the not-knowing is doing something important that you just can’t see yet?