There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.

– Rumi

There are things that we know that we can’t articulate, for at times the heart uses a language that doesn’t speak in a tongue that we are familiar with. And yet if we listen, we will know what to do, we will know where to go, we will know what is right.

The task lies in our ability to sit with uncertainty. And if we have the courage to do that, we will notice that the universe often conspires to give us what we need.

How can this be?

According to me, there are two parts when it comes to listening to uncertainty.

The first, is to acknowledge that there is voice within ourselves that doesn’t speak in a language; and the second is to understand our ability to find what we are looking for.

Intuition is often the name given to the voice that we hear that we can’t seem to explain. Neither based in emotion nor logic, intuition is the subconscious pushing its presence into consciousness.

The visceral reaction often appears in the form stress. “Stress” is caused by excessive neuorchecmial secretions of adrenaline and noradrenaline. The outcome is knots in the stomach, headaches, nausea, fatigue. Stress has many shapes and forms, and howsoever stress appears in your body, it is a physiological indicator that “something that you are doing, just isn’t working”.

Often, we ignore the signs. We work through the stress, justifying reason after reason why it’s alright to feel this way. And sure, there are levels of stress that are actually helpful and productive, the caveat is in the longevity of presence.

When stress is continuous and/or compounding, it means we need to listen. Our bodies are quite literally telling us that we need to change something, it’s just using a language we aren’t used to listening to. And yet, we must still listen. Furthermore, we must be willing to sit with the uncertainty of not being able to completely define with logic and reason the reality that we may need.

Once we do this, we are ready to understand the relationship between what we think and what we find.

Reality is constructed through perception. Therefore, the narrative that I tell myself, or the reasons that I give to myself, or what I believe to be true is frame of reference I will look outwards with and reinforce. It is in this regard, that we will always find what we are looking for.

Where most of humanity fails, is in realizing the limitation of power that comes from our need to anchor our wish into particular “how’s.”

For example, if we ask for love, a possible self narrative that we construct could be that “love comes from another”.

The wish was for love, and by limiting the way it comes to us, we limit our ability to listen, and see all the forms in which love is coming our way.

Love as a concept appears every time we exchange memories with friends, or when we take a long shower and light a candle, or when we walk in the park and breathe the crisp winter air. Our wish for love, is answered in many ways, and yet since the narrative we constructed created a belief that love could only find us through another person, we missed many signs that the universe sent on love.

And because we didn’t find what we were looking for in the how we asked for it, we begin to believe that the universe isn’t listening.

Yet the fault isn’t in the universe not listening, rather the limitation is in our need for certainty.

To ask for love, happiness, belonging and to tie it to a particular narrative is to limit what we can find, and similarly what can find us.

At the end, our task lies in our ability to do both things: listen to the voices that speak in languages we can’t always narrate, and learn the power we have when it comes to articulating what we seek. In brief, the ask is that of embracing uncertainty.

Today, I am learning to listen to what cannot be heard, and see what cannot be seen, and say what cannot be spoken.

Today, I am willing to ask the universe for what I need, and not tie it down to one narrative.

Today, I am willing to sit with uncertainty.