This Father's Day weekend, we took a short trip to a lake in Oklahoma.

Somewhere along the drive, my phone died.

My wife looked over and jokingly said, "Oh no. What are we going to do now when I want to know the answer to some dumb question? Just think about it all day?"

We laughed.

My son glared.

My daughter pouted about something else entirely.

And we kept driving.

But the comment stuck with me.

Because that used to be normal.

You'd hear a song and not know the artist.

Wonder where an actor disappeared to.

Argue about a sports statistic with a friend, both of you secretly suspecting the other might be making the whole thing up.

See a strange bird and have no idea what it was.

And unless you happened to come across the answer later, you simply lived with the question.

And even worse—with the very real possibility that you'd forget you ever wondered about it in the first place.

And increasingly, it occurs to me that we've removed not just major inconveniences from our lives, but many of the smallest and most meaningless ones as well.

Not knowing the name of a song.

Not knowing who played a character in a movie.

Not knowing the capital of a state or the answer to a random trivia question.

None of those things really matter.

But they all required the same thing:

Being willing to sit with not knowing.

For most of human history, uncertainty wasn't something to be eliminated. It was simply part of daily life.

Today, we carry a device in our pocket that can answer almost any question in seconds.

Which is remarkable.

But it also means we rarely have to practice the skill of living with unanswered questions.

And I wonder if that's part of why uncertainty feels so uncomfortable now.

We've become accustomed to immediate answers to the small questions.

But life still asks questions that can't be answered with a quick search.

Questions like:

Am I making the right career decision?

Should we buy this house?

Am I being a good father?

Is my marriage as strong as I think it is?

What should the next chapter of life look like?

You can read books.

Listen to podcasts.

Ask ChatGPT.

Talk to people who have been there before.

And all of those things can help.

But eventually, you still have to make a decision before you know how the story ends.

You still have to move forward without complete information.

You still have to live with uncertainty.

We've trained ourselves to expect immediate answers to the small questions.

Yet life continues to ask the big ones.

And unlike the name of a song or the capital of a state, those answers don't arrive in ten seconds.

Sometimes they take months.

Sometimes they take years.

Sometimes you don't know whether you made the right decision until long after the decision has already been made.

And maybe that's the hidden cost.

Not that we can instantly find the answer to a trivia question.

That's wonderful.

Not that we no longer have to spend three hours driving around looking for an address.

That's wonderful too.

The problem isn't that we've eliminated inconvenience.

The problem is that we've eliminated so much of it that we rarely have opportunities to practice being uncomfortable.

A generation ago, daily life was full of tiny frustrations.

You waited for photos to be developed.

You waited for a letter to arrive.

You sat through commercials.

You got lost.

You stood in line.

You wondered about things and never found the answer.

None of those inconveniences were particularly important.

But they were repetitions.

Tiny opportunities to practice patience.

Tiny opportunities to practice uncertainty.

Tiny opportunities to learn that discomfort wasn't an emergency.

That's a lesson worth remembering.

Because today, the moment we feel uncertain, confused, bored, or uncomfortable, our instinct is often to eliminate the feeling.

But not every uncomfortable feeling is a problem to solve.

Because that's what many of us have quietly forgotten.

Not every uncomfortable feeling requires immediate resolution.

Not every question requires an immediate answer.

Not every uncertainty needs to disappear before we can move forward.

The reality is that most meaningful parts of life involve uncertainty.

Marriage does.

Parenting does.

Careers do.

Aging certainly does.

There is no app that can tell you with certainty whether you're raising your children correctly.

No search engine that can tell you exactly what the next decade of your life should look like.

No AI tool that can guarantee you've made the right decision.

Eventually, we're all forced to do what previous generations did every day:

Live with a question for a while.

Maybe the goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty.

Maybe the goal is to become the kind of person who can function in spite of it.

To make the best decision you can with the information you have.

To trust your values when certainty isn't available.

To keep showing up for your family while questions remain unanswered.

Because that's what adulthood often looks like.

Not certainty.

Steadiness.

Not knowing exactly where the road leads.

But continuing to walk it anyway.

The truth is, some of the most important decisions in my life came with no guarantees.

Getting married.

Having children.

Changing jobs.

None of them came with a flashing sign that said, "This is definitely the right choice."

They came with uncertainty.

Just like most meaningful things do.

Maybe that's why learning to live with unanswered questions matters.

Not because we'll ever enjoy uncertainty.

But because life keeps handing it to us.

And the sooner we stop expecting every question to have an immediate answer, the more peace we can find while we wait for life to reveal the answer.

Until next time—
keep the fires burning.
– Clay

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