Just One Step Forward: Finding My Way Through Uncertainty

If there’s one thing I know well, it’s that life is often filled with uncertainty. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. One of the hardest things for me to do is sit with that uncertainty. I like order and feeling in control and when I don’t have either, everything feels chaotic.

This has been a tough week for me having gone through some minor procedures, both causing physical pain. One included the dreaded “I saw something concerning” doctor speech. Now it’s the anxious waiting for test results, the “what ifs” going wild, while feeling alone and unseen.

In addition to the physical challenges, today has also been filled with other uncertainties at work and at home leaving me sitting here wondering why life feels so heavy right now. How can I find relief when everything feels so out of control? Can I be brave enough to sit in the uncertainty of it all?

As I ponder it all, I find myself remembering a recent walk. This time I prepared by taking pain medication prior. But I learned that even when fully prepared, we can’t always control the pain. So, as I grimaced in pain with each step, I found myself saying, I am not the pain, I am not the pain.

I didn’t want the pain to define me and make my walk less rewarding. I wanted to keep it separate. On a previous walk I found when I shifted the focus from the pain and paid attention to the beauty around me, things changed. It wasn’t that the pain went away, it just wasn’t my focus.

So, on this walk, I tried something similar and found myself feeling connected to the trees, the mountains, the sky and felt a moment of peace. In doing so, I wondered if it’s okay to connect with all the beauty while trying to disconnect from the pain—might the pain also contain beauty in its own way?

This created a different shift. I began looking at the experience and embracing it all, including the pain. I saw how there was compassion toward the pain and the change in paths to avoid hills that made it worse. I noticed gratitude toward my body for all that it has endured and its amazing ability to keep going.

As I began looking at it differently, I pondered why I kept coming on these walks when it was painful to do so. I wondered why I couldn’t do the same thing in other areas of my life—just take one step forward at a time even when there was pain or resistance to do so.

Later, as I sat in front of my laptop, overwhelmed by the growing list of all I needed to do, I felt paralyzed. I didn’t know what step to take. My overwhelm was filled with uncertainty and fear and the shame of feeling like a failure. I didn’t want to sit with those emotions. So, like many times before, I just wanted to turn to food or other coping behaviors that gave me a moment of escape.

Then I thought about my walk. I knew what would help most was getting organized again with my emails. That alone felt like a daunting project … until I began to see it as just another walk around the park. Each email was just one step. While the step may feel painful, I knew I could stop at any time to rest.

It was amazing to feel the shift inside. It wasn’t that my enormous load of emails went away, but the story around it changed and I immediately got to work. With each email, I reminded myself it was one step and quickly took care of it. Or I assigned it as a task to deal with later, knowing I didn’t have to stress about it now. After an hour, I had made it a quarter of the way on my email walk, and I felt very happy.

I share all this because I need the reminder—that the uncertainty I feel right now is just another walk around the park. Yes, it’s filled with pain, fear, and the “what ifs” that surface when the future feels unknown. Nothing has changed, and it’s okay to feel all of it.

And yet I am learning that sitting with uncertainty—rather than trying to outrun it—creates far less suffering than I expected. Not because the pain disappears or the unknowns resolve themselves, but because one step forward is always available. And then another.