When the air is foggy, do you enjoy the haziness or do you grasp for clarity?
When you go to the same park and see the same field all the time, any small change will be instantly noticeable and exciting. A dense line of fog hovered above the familiar field when I went there last week. It was just thick enough that it looked like a visitor to the field, aware of how much space it was taking up in the landscape. Normally I would have walked past the fog while smiling at it, but this day, I saw someone trekking through it. And I wanted to know what that felt like.
After some minutes of staring at it, I started circling towards the whiteness, stopping on the way sometimes, musing at it. The dense line faded out into mist, enveloping me as the tip of my shoe darkened. The smell became damp, my vision blurry.
I arrived in the middle of the fog, took in the hazy experience and eased into enjoying the lack of clarity. I don’t know what I was expecting but I stood there thinking: fog is just air and water. So elemental and ephemeral but complex and graspable at a distance.
At some point, I started feeling unsettled by the haziness so I made my way out. I didn’t go back the same way. I started circling slowly towards another end, sometimes stopping and turning back to look, savouring my way out of the fog. It felt like the right thing to do.
One of my longest standing research problems has been to find ways of living a fulfilling life outside the limitations of well-trodden paths. I know I’m not alone in this. It’s the reason I was initially drawn to startups and tech. You meet people who are entrepreneurial by nature, which can mean many things, but what I’m referring to is a positive attitude towards shaping one’s reality plus a general belief in one’s ability to achieve things and to have an impact out in the world (regardless of the size). People with high agency would be another way to describe them.
What I noticed is that people who live fulfilling, harmonious lives—complete with achievements, responsibility, loving relationships, fun, as well as rest—tend to have a secure relationship to their mental ideals and lived experience. They’re responsive to both imagination and reality, able to navigate uncertainty and hold certainty loosely. They use imagination to create direction, pragmatism to set achievable goals and stay flexible when reality doesn’t match their expectations.
My latest mantra is that the solution to many things is not either/or—it’s often both, it’s often and, it’s often all. Without imagination and vision, we wouldn’t have something to strive for. Without reality and pragmatism, we wouldn’t execute on our ideas. And without flexibility and adaptation, we can’t bridge the gap between imagination and reality to build anything that withstands time and storms.
This is easier said than done. The fact is, we spend a lot of energy chasing impractical fantasies or clinging to rigid reality because we don’t want to experience the changes in our feelings—the emotional discomfort that comes with facing the gap between fantasy and reality, or from simply walking in the not-knowing. We’d rather forget that the space between “what should be” and “what is” is something to be experienced positively. Savoured in motion and navigated with flexibility, not bypassed completely or trekked through as fast as possible.
One of the reasons I wasn’t able to build anything sustainably fulfilling in the past was because I found it so difficult to execute flexibility. I was either too flexible like ink swimming in water, or too inflexible like a rock sitting at the bottom of water. Knowing when to adapt and how much is perhaps one of the most essential skills you need when everything around you is changing at a speed that your human nervous system cannot fathom.
It requires a certain kind of judgement that can only come from the experience of fogs: navigating complex problems and uncertainty while feeling lost, sitting with despair and receiving almost-eureka moments. Certain fogs you must navigate alone, for yourself. With loving support, of course, but you can’t pull other people into a fog you chose, expect them to hold your hand, find the path, and then walk you out as well.
Uncertainty doesn’t have to be scary, painful, bliss, or exhilarating—it shouldn’t be synonymous with a certain feeling or a set of feelings. It’s an “evocative and generative state”, as Nix writes:
You make a few turns, not knowing which way is right or wrong, but each time you get slightly more precise. Precision compounds. You give yourself the benefit of the doubt. You commit to occupy difficult emotions. You release your expectations in order for things to reveal themselves to you. It’s a hopeful reminder that you haven’t yet met all the people who will mean something to you, or all of the ideas that will take root and bloom in your heart.
When I came out the other end of the fog, I stared at it again in its distant shape but this time with a knowing rooted in lived experience instead of just curiosity. The fog was demystified, but it’s okay. I still think it’s beautiful, and I’d do it all again.
On the path near this other end, there was someone else standing and staring at the fog. As I arrived, a couple of meters away, I couldn’t help but wonder: what fog are you navigating, stranger?
He seemed perfectly content observing it at a distance.
And I smiled as I thought him goodbye.
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Links to help you navigate fogs
Silent stories by Sofi Paez
This debut album by Sofi touched a part of me that I like to avoid.
uncertainty is an evocative state by Nix
I glanced over this piece and saved it for “read again later” when I first came across it. Upon genuinely reading it, I was very amused by how similar my thoughts and conclusions were. I felt like I was restating so much of what Nix wrote, and I see this as a beautiful synchronicity now. The reason the piece couldn’t hold my attention at the time was because I wouldn’t have received the message anyway. Certain kinds of wisdom will only truly land once you’ve acquired the embodied experience of it.
if a person was a house by Shani
Become a person with a sturdy foundation first, then you’ll find the people you can truly lean on.Your intuition about someone’s foundation is your experience of their psychological resilience. If you are around someone who feels wobbly, you might sense that they have a limited capacity to be with you because they’re too worried about themselves.
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process by Henrik Karlsson
On learning through doing and feedback loops, instead of thinking and executing plans.
If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
The Right Kind of Stubborn by Paul Graham
To help figure out if you’re being persistent or obstinate to your own detriment.
One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep thinking of things to try.
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A poem
the smell of soaked dirt glistening tears can’t see from the blurry air but i catch a glimpse i sense it. a world in a rain drop, i fear. it’s what i’ve always feared.
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With love,
Lin
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