Anxiety is caused by worrying about the future.
Worrying can be helpful if it encourages us to make wise preparations. But, too often, anxiety spirals out of control, and we fixate on catastrophes that probably won’t occur.
This goes hand-in-hand with a desire to both know and control what’s going to happen.
Both are impossible.
We can’t know what’s going to happen, and we can’t control what’s going to happen.
Deep down, we understand this, but we don’t accept it. So we feel anxious. We waste energy worrying. We avoid making decisions. We procrastinate.
Thus, we need to embrace uncertainty. It’s never going away. It’s just a fact of life.
But just because the future is uncertain does not mean we should become passive. We can still influence the future by being proactive, like good Stoics, focusing on what we can control: our choices, our actions.
And we should not allow uncertainty to keep us from taking a necessary risk or committing to a course of action, for we cannot grow without these things.
We have to move forward, despite the uncertainty, knowing that we’ll do our best, come what may.
That’s what it means to embrace uncertainty.
Not gambling but living.