Getting Comfortable in the Unknown

By Brea Segger

I've been thinking a lot lately about our relationship with space.

Not the kind of space we say we want. Most people will tell you they want more time, more freedom, less stress, fewer obligations. I'm talking about the kind of space that appears when there is nothing immediate demanding your attention. The moments when there is no problem to solve, no deadline to meet, no decision that absolutely has to be made today.

It's interesting because many of us spend years working toward exactly that. We tell ourselves that once the business is stable, once the children are older, once the relationship is sorted out, once we've achieved a certain level of success, then we'll finally be able to relax.

And yet, when those moments arrive, they often don't feel the way we imagined they would.

Instead of enjoying the spaciousness, we rush to fill it.

We pick up our phones. We start another project. We look for a new challenge. We scroll, consume, plan, worry, organize, improve, optimize. We find something—anything—to direct our attention toward. It happens so automatically that most of us don't even notice we're doing it.

I've caught myself doing this more times than I can count.

For a long time, I thought my discomfort came from uncertainty. I assumed that if I could just figure out what was next, I would feel at ease. If I could make the decision, create the plan, or gain more clarity, then the restlessness would disappear.

What I've come to realize is that uncertainty wasn't actually the problem.

The problem was my relationship with not knowing.

There is a difference.

Uncertainty is a circumstance. Not knowing is an experience.

And for many of us, it is an experience we have very little practice with.

The mind wants resolution. It wants answers. It wants a sense of control over what is coming next. When it doesn't have that, it starts working overtime. It revisits the past looking for clues. It projects into the future searching for certainty. It loops through conversations, decisions, possibilities, and worst-case scenarios, anything to avoid sitting in the reality that some things simply have not revealed themselves yet.

When we're lost in those loops, we're rarely here.

We're in yesterday.

Or next month.

Or five years from now.

But we're not here.

And yet here is the only place life is actually happening.

The strange thing is that when I look back on the most meaningful periods of growth in my life, almost all of them involved some kind of unknown. There were times when I didn't know where a relationship was headed, what direction my work would take, where I would live, or what I was being called toward next.

At the time, I wanted answers. Looking back, I can see that those seasons were asking something entirely different of me.

They were asking me to trust.

Not trust that everything would work out exactly the way I wanted, but trust that I could remain present even without having the answers.

I think this is why spaciousness feels so uncomfortable for many people. When there is nothing immediate to focus on, we come face-to-face with ourselves. We meet the restlessness, the fear, the loneliness, the uncertainty, and all the things we've been keeping busy enough not to feel.

That's not always pleasant.

In fact, sometimes it feels easier to stay distracted.

But I've also noticed that something else lives in that space.

Creativity lives there.

Intuition lives there.

Honesty lives there.

The deeper conversations we need to have with ourselves often live there too.

None of those things can be rushed. They don't arrive when we're forcing answers or trying to think our way into certainty. They tend to emerge when we've been still long enough to hear them.

Perhaps that's why the unknown matters.

Not because it contains the answers, but because it invites us into a different relationship with ourselves. One that isn't built on certainty, productivity, or constant movement. One that is willing to be present with what is here, even when what is here hasn't fully revealed where it's leading.

I'm not sure becoming comfortable in the unknown is something we ever master. I suspect it's more of a practice. A willingness to stay a little longer than we normally would. A willingness to resist the urge to immediately fill every open space.

And maybe, over time, we discover that the spaciousness we were trying so hard to escape was never empty at all.