We want to know everything.
We want to know what will happen next month, next year, in the decades ahead, in our whole life. We want to know whether this decision is the right one, whether this person will stay, whether this effort will bear fruit. We want, above all, to know that things will work out — whatever working out means to us in this particular season of life.
And when that certainty does not come— we suffer.
But here is something I have sat with for a long time: the suffering is rarely caused by uncertainty itself. It is caused by our quarrel with uncertainty. By our insistence that life should be knowable, predictable, safe in the way we have decided safety should feel.
Life has never agreed to these terms.
Nothing in this world is fixed. The breath itself is uncertain — each inhalation offers no guarantee of the next. The ancient wisdom understood this not as a tragedy but as the very nature of existence.
Shri Krishna names it plainly in the Bhagavad Gita:
अनित्यमसुखं लोकमिमं प्राप्य भजस्व माम् ।। ३३।।
anityam asukhaṃ lokam imaṃ prāpya bhajasva mām
Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 9, Verse 33
“Having obtained this impermanent and joyless world — turn toward Me.”
Krishna does not say, find a way to make the world permanent. He does not offer a strategy for securing what cannot be secured. He simply names what is true — this world is impermanent, it holds suffering — and offers a direction. Not outward into what cannot hold us. Inward, toward what can.
Anitya — impermanence — is not something that happens to us. It is the texture of everything that exists. Including us. And once we truly accept this, not just intellectually but in the bones, something in us stops fighting what was never meant to be fought.
What spirituality offers is not the end of uncertainty. What it offers instead is something far more useful: the inner capacity to stand in the midst of the unknown without collapsing.
Not because we are told everything will be fine. But because something in us, through practice and inquiry and the slow work of understanding, becomes less dependent on things being fine in order to remain steady.
Whatever happens is best for me —
This is not naive optimism. It is a profound shift, from a person who needs life to conform to their preferences in order to feel safe, to a person who has found a ground inside themselves that the uncertainties of life cannot dissolve.
That ground is what I understand spirituality builds. our relationship with it does.
We stop asking why is this happening to me and begin asking what is this teaching me? And that single shift — from victim to student — changes not the facts of our life, but the entire experience of living it.
