It is without certainty

We crave clarity, understanding, certainty. Our language carves the world into neat boxes: is and is not, true and false, beginning and end. But lived experience refuses to stay in those lines. Lived experience says otherwise. The fabric of life is porous, fluid, dynamic, ambiguous, endlessly entangled.

Stephen Batchelor puts it well:

“You witness a seamless process of changing phenomena, which is porous and fluid with no clear-cut beginnings or ends. ‘Is’ and ‘is not’ split experience up in a way that facilitates human communication but is alien to the natural world. The neat dividing lines of thought and language are not discernible in the fuzzy fabric of life.” (Buddha, Socrates, and Us, 2025)

That resonates because it gives words to what I keep circling around: the world is ambiguous, complex, mechanical, and often without reason. Life isn’t ruled by certainty, it is without certainty. Reality is without certainty.

That’s a strange thing to say. To claim “it is without” while simultaneously denying the solidity that phrase normally promises.

Yet the paradox is the point. To try to live awake is to resist the seduction of false clarity without falling into the despair of meaninglessness.

The Stoics wanted order, the Pyrrhonists suspended judgment, the Buddhists spoke of emptiness, and Gurdjieff warned of our sleep. Each, in its own language, points to the same unsettling recognition: we walk in a world woven of shifting threads, not fixed bricks.

To see that clearly is not to slide head first into nihilism, but to walk headstrong toward humility. It reminds me that my task is not to cling to certainty, but to cultivate attention—because in attention, even the fuzziness of life becomes clear.

Like the desert itself: always shifting, never still, its dunes drawn and erased by the wind. No line is final, no shape endures, and yet within its shifting sands there is a stark and undeniable presence.

“The desert is the enemy and the friend.” — Dune