How to Cope With Change and Uncertainty

Statistical significance won't save us from the oldest cosmic expression: chaos.

Reviewed by Tyler Woods

Key points

• The only certainty in life is uncertainty, but knowing this doesn't make change any easier.
• Within most of us exists an instinct to resist chaos in some capacity.
• Seek wisdom rather than generalized knowledge when a significant change, transition, or loss occurs.
• Chaos, change and uncertainty are an appointment with destiny.

Change is everywhere. The seasons, weather, this moment in time, our bodies or moods...it all changes. Sometimes, change is predictable, but most often, it is not.

Amongst philosophers, it is often said that the only certainty in life is uncertainty, and yet this logical realization offers little emotional comfort when people experience significant change, uncertainty, or transition in their lives. This is because knowing change occurs is far different from experientially going through change.

Our reactions to change are typically felt, emotional, convoluted, and psychologically stirring or messy, which makes most people uncomfortable. Change is often distressing when we experience the great unknown with something we are personally attached to. When change occurs in our relationships, finances, career, or around our health, the experience can be overwhelming, chaotic, and disorienting.

Change, transition, uncertainty, and loss in any form can even challenge our fundamental ideas about fairness or justice, or shatter the meaning we ascribe to the world itself.¹ After a significant experience of change or transition, people may ask in one form or another:

• Where is the security and order that was promised to me?
• How could this happen? How could life, the universe, or god, lead me here?
• I thought bad things aren’t supposed to happen to good people?
• Why? Why this? Why now? Why me?
• What am I supposed to do with this? What are the coping tools?

The instinct to resist chaos...

The instinct to resist chaos and avoid distressing thoughts or feelings is likely as old as the history of our species.²

Within the Western world, we’ve carefully constructed the scientific enterprise over the past four hundred years. Science is all about technical mastery, predictability, control, and statistical significance. Science has changed our world in so many brilliant ways, and yet, a scientific attitude has little utility when we experience profound change in our personal lives. I realize what a personal blow this is to those of us who thought science and other systematic approaches could give us the answers we crave.

There simply is no predictable, straightforward, generalized, or purely cognitive ways through life transitions. The answers you seek are not "out there." Generalized knowledge has little utility when we are forced to grapple with the oldest cosmic expressions of the universe: chaos, change, and uncertainty.

When all is called into question, seek wisdom and personal authority

Seismic life transitions requires people to orient to the specific, subjective, and complicated contexts of their unique lives. The ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that dominates so much of the Western psyche is completely unhelpful when we confront the profound depths associated with change, transition, and uncertainty.

It is time to engage with the mystery of your life as it presents itself to you.³ Give yourself permission to grapple with the big questions of your life, even if it displeases the people in your life or challenges the status quo. These questions may make your life more complicated, but the questions demand to be lived, and will be your guide on this harrowing journey through the inferno.

Learning to live in the shadows of mystery is also easier when we can connect with trusted others. Seeking hopeful paths together allows us to identify our needs, find much needed care, and receive daily affirmations around our humanity. Trusted, safe, and thoughtful people can make life worth living, particularly when we have lost our way.

Your appointment with destiny has arrived. It’s name is change and uncertainty. You won’t be able to purely think your way through this one, so I invite you to lean into yourself and seek wisdom rather than generalized knowledge. The good news is that there are many diverse ways to recover self-agency and personal authority when we consciously live the questions which haunt us.

Follow the serpentine path of your inner life with all it’s bewildering twists and turns. When in doubt, allow something deeper to find expression through you. A clinical supervisor of mine once taught me that this might mean we need to send the ‘logical’ or ‘practical’ version of ourselves on a much needed vacation as to honour our autonomous feelings.

Go inwards to move outwards into your life, and eventually, I suspect you'll see a pattern within all of these experiences that amazes you. Our world needs an individuated response to the times we live in, and it has never been any other way.

You are the one you are waiting for.