Dealing with Uncertainty

In contrast, the improvisational spirit lives inside that gap, and it can be surprisingly full of ingenuity and joy even when the situation is dire. As something we share with our nonhuman brethren, the capacity to form new responses is how you know you’re alive, today, here. So when my mum says, “whatever happens, happens,” what I hear is not

Sendak understood that stories can be scary. He believed that we should all—kids and adults alike—experience stories that deliver encounters with all the emotions available to us; that scary stories are how we become prepared for any eventuality. Indeed, this is the very reason we need stories. We don’t do well with uncertainty, and so we seek out

It’s no wonder that Montessori is flourishing, along with other highly ideological school formats like Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, forest schooling, worldschooling, and many, many others.

These schools focus the chaos of parenting into something manageable, tightening the vice of parenting and family with heavy norms. They know their job is not to

Different as it sounds, this kind of triumphalism had something in common with paralysed heartbreak. One rested in arrogant assurance, while the other rested in despair. Both saw the future as something offstage, rather than as the thing we were always creating in every moment, whether we acknowledged it or not. And both forgot that essential truth

We’re waking up to the reality that uncertainty is not a war to be fought or a disease to be eradicated but an inherent quality of a complex world. We need to cultivate our collective capacity to sit with uncertainty and complexity.

Cultures vary in the degree to which they value openness and tolerate uncertainty. Some cultures lead people to experience anxiety in situations that are ambiguous or unpredictable, and these cultures are structured in ways that make the world seem more stable and predictable through strict rules and laws, shared beliefs, and circumscribed ways of