In the past century, our world has become obsessed with the ideas of safety, planning, and certainty. In this schema, insecurity feels like failure. We fill our calendars, plotting out the days and weeks, tracking our health, insuring our homes and vehicles, and even insuring ourselves. This all appears to be an extended effort to shield ourselves from the unpredictability of life. Beneath this seemingly endless pursuit of control lies a deep-seated trepidation: the more we strive to secure ourselves against change, the more anxious and estranged we become from our own lives.
The result of this effort is a kind of spiritual exhaustion that feels all too familiar today, an exhaustion that has only deepened as technology has accelerated the pace of life. All of our phone apps have promised more control, more insight and organization, and yet we are more restless than ever. The constant stream of notifications, reminders, and optimizations has not freed us from the tyranny of uncertainty; it has amplified it. We check our health metrics, monitor our sleep, or plan our finances for decades ahead of time, but beneath it all persists a gnawing sense that something essential still escapes our control. This is the impossible challenge of security: the harder we try to make life predictable, the more fragile we feel. In most cases, insecurity is not the fear of danger, but the fear of uncertainty itself. Our minds long for permanence in a world that offers none. And so we grasp, plan, and worry, hoping to force the unforeseeable into our control. But life, by its very nature, refuses to be managed.
In the wake of modernity, our existence has become increasingly dominated by the demand for uniformity and constancy. Yet, in the midst of this, we have become estranged from the only reality we can ever truly confirm: the present moment. The future is not a fact but a projection: a hope, a fear, a calculation, only existing in our own thoughts. The more we project ourselves into it, the more unreal our lives become. Real security, if it truly exists, is not found in our careful plans or in our accumulated possessions, but in the depth of our presence. When one truly inhabits the now, the current moment, fear begins to lose its grip. The present moment, though fleeting, is complete. It contains no uncertainty because it is not about what will be; it is simply what is. To live in the wisdom of insecurity is not to become reckless or indifferent to life. It is to act fully and make ordinary plans, and to do so with a quiet awareness that all things invariably change.
This is, of course, easier said than done. To detach from the illusion of control requires practice, the kind of practice that looks less like effort and more like surrender to the unfolding of the world. It is the art of noticing when the mind races ahead to what “could happen”, and gently bringing it back to what is happening now. It is remembering that life flows, and that each ordinary moment is the only real one we will ever have. You might say this requires the greatest art: to live fully while knowing nothing can be held. And in that you would be right. This kind of surrender demands courage, patience, and continual practice. Yet the good news is that you already possess everything you need. You don’t need to wait for the right circumstances, or for your plans to settle, or for certainty to arrive. You have, at this very moment, the only time there is: now.
