Step back into a moment when the world had changed for you. Maybe you held your baby and had no idea what to do with the overwhelming love and the almost equally overwhelming anxiety. Maybe your business was failing or growing in ways you didn’t see coming. Maybe someone made you an offer and you had no idea if it was an opportunity or a mistake.
You can escape some of these situations, but no one escapes all of them. Often we find ourselves in a strange landscape without a map. No one prepared you for this moment when you need to choose without appropriate information or expertise. It’s normal if you freeze just thinking about it.
But nature has prepared you with an antidote. As much as your whole brain/body/mind system resists uncertainty, sometimes you seek it. Sometimes you reach beyond what you know, even though it feels risky. Sometimes you explore.
The antidote for uncertainty is curiosity.
You can’t feel uncertain and curious at the same time. Once you are curious, you can still be scared and you can still be torn between competing priorities. But you also want to take a next step. You also want to know what it feels like to do the thing or to understand the experience or to make the connection.
If you spend your life telling yourself that curiosity is distracting or childish, you’ll miss the point. You’ll be stuck without an antidote for uncertainty.
