Alan Watts called it the wisdom of insecurity: the recognition that our need to eliminate uncertainty is what makes us anxious in the first place. We try to nail down permanence where none exists. We try to solve the problem of fragility with more control, only to create greater fragility.

It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life,

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