Security feels like a promise.
We chase it through five-year plans, budgets, and carefully engineered futures.
It’s comforting – the architecture of predictability.
But as most systems eventually learn, security isn’t a state.
It’s a temporary equilibrium between change events.
We mistake equilibrium for safety, and then build identities, organizations, and relationships around maintaining that balance long after the variables have shifted.
When systems lose coherence
Lately, I keep hearing the same note – from founders, parents, leaders, community members:
Exhaustion. Grief. Anger.
People mourning what feels like a world unraveling whether it be markets, institutions or certainties.
It’s understandable. There is pain in watching systems lose coherence, whether societal or personal.
But staying in that emotional state indefinitely comes at a cost.
At some point, mourning has to give way to movement.
Pain is information, not a permanent address.
Chaos, agency, and adaptation
If we linger in despair too long, we lose sight of agency, our ability to act and to reframe.
Chaos theory reminds us that complex systems are exquisitely sensitive.
Tiny perturbations whether it be a decision, a conversation, or a temperature shift, can produce disproportionate change over time.
In stable systems, agency is predictable but limited.
In unstable systems, agency multiplies.
Uncertainty expands the range of what’s possible.
That’s the paradox: the moment we lose certainty, we gain creative freedom.
Letting go, responsively
Letting go of the illusion of control isn’t surrender.
It’s clarity.
Control was never the key variable. Responsiveness was.
When we accept uncertainty as the baseline condition of complex life, we can operate as part of it… not apart from it.
We stop trying to contain turbulence and start learning to move with it.
True stability is not the still pond.
It’s the surfer balancing on a moving wave.
The work
The task, then, isn’t to demand a world that never wobbles.
It’s to cultivate sensitivity, our capacity to perceive small shifts, and the courage to stay in motion with them.
Because agency is an emergent property of uncertainty.
Without chaos, there’s no space for choice.
Life doesn’t owe us safety or certainty – only participation.
Our job is to stay aware, stay kind, and keep responding, again and again,
as the wave keeps moving.