At the start of my senior year of high school, I found myself drawn to books about improving my attitude and outlook on life.

I turned to titles such as Psycho-Cybernetics, Thoughts Through Space, and How to Use the Power of Prayer for solace, guidance, and inspiration.

At eighteen, I couldn’t name what was going on, but moving in this direction felt natural.

These books suggested that human beings possess underused mental and spiritual capacities, and that through certain techniques and practices, life could be dramatically improved.

At the same time, they implied the self needed to be healed, empowered, or expanded.

However, I wasn’t aware of these deeper implications. I simply experienced the books as hopeful, inspiring, and filled with possibility.

Few, if any, of my classmates shared my enthusiasm, and I never mentioned any of this to my mom or dad.

For weeks, I had been having a hard time falling asleep at night. I would turn on my transistor radio next to my bed and listen softly to my favorite AM station out of Chicago, WCFL. The reception was often spotty, and I’d feel a small sense of relief whenever I turned the dial just so and locked in a clear signal of the music I liked. WCFL was located several hundred miles from where I lived in New York.

When sleep didn’t come, I would sometimes lift my leg up into the air and let it drop back onto the bed, almost as if I were trying to exhaust myself physically.

During this time, something else started happening.

As I struggled to relax and drift off to sleep, I would suddenly feel as though some force were trying to enter my body.

It felt as if my spirit, or some part of me, was being squeezed out and off the side of the bed. I fought against this sensation inch by inch, feeling as though I were trying to claw my way back into my body.

If this had been a one-off experience, I’d probably have forgotten about it. But this happened several more times over a few weeks. I had no idea what was going on.

I first corresponded with the author, Harold Sherman, when ordering his book How to Use the Power of Prayer. When the book arrived, I found a small prayer meditation pamphlet tucked inside the book jacket.

On the typed pamphlet, Sherman had written a personal note encouraging me to use this seven-point meditation each night before bed. As I read it, I felt my body begin to relax and sink more deeply into the bed. I told myself I now had a way to protect myself from this strange experience, and that perhaps I could finally fall asleep more easily.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but looking back, I can see how his personal correspondence may have encouraged me during a sensitive and uncertain time in my life.

Not long afterward, I ordered his book Thoughts Through Space. It arrived a few weeks later in an oversized brown padded envelope. To my surprise, inside was a thick hardcover copy of the book. I had been expecting a paperback.

The book felt heavy in my hands. Its dark blue cover and gold-lettered title gave it the appearance of something old and important, while the thick, parchment-colored pages made it feel as though it belonged to another era. It even carried a slight musty smell.

Sitting on my bed in my downstairs basement bedroom, I opened to the front cover and was thrilled to discover Sherman’s handwritten inscription directed to me:

“Dear John: My thoughts go out through space to wish for you the finest things in life!”

In the weeks that followed, I began using these books in an effort to make things better.

I recited the prayer meditation each night before going to bed. This practice gave me a warm feeling of being held and protected by an invisible force I hoped would watch over me and protect me.

From Psycho-Cybernetics, I started to rehearse in my mind’s eye successfully shooting foul shots on the basketball court, hoping to improve my performance and increase my chances of becoming a starter on the high school team.

In Thoughts Through Space, I was fascinated by the idea that thought itself could travel and influence the mind of another. At night, lying in bed, I would focus my thoughts outward toward a high school friend, as if I might be able to reach his mind and send him messages.

Looking back, I can see that each of these approaches, though different in form, pointed in the same direction.

Whether it was prayer, visualization, or directing thought outward, each suggested something within me needed to be improved, strengthened, or brought into alignment.

Only later would I begin to recognize how easily this way of thinking can also carry the sense that something about the self needs fixing or repair.

What I did not yet understand was how naturally this longing could evolve into a search for a more complete and authoritative vision of reality.

Over time, that search would lead me into deep involvement with a religious movement that appeared to provide the right answers to my most pressing questions.

I felt fortunate to have found a story large enough to make sense of my life. It gave me a way to stand in the world with confidence and conviction about the future.

My steps grew lighter. There was more energy and bounce in my stride. My posture straightened. I smiled a lot more. I felt a renewed sense of purpose and meaning to my life.

But over time, things began to happen that gradually loosened the certainty I had once carried so completely.

I recall an experience during this period involving a co-worker who invited me to attend a Sunday service at his church. At one point during the service, a slim, elderly-looking man with silver-gray hair came to the front to give his personal testimony of faith. Early in his remarks, he said:

“I must be different than most people. Because, since the beginning of my faith journey many years ago, I’ve not changed one iota regarding my conviction about the truth of our teachings.”

Sitting there next to my co-worker, I marveled at what he had just said. Here was a man involved with his faith for decades who had not altered his views about his church and its teachings one bit. I took him at his word.

On my train ride back home afterward, I thought a lot about what this man had to say. What struck me was not whether he was right or wrong, sincere or insincere.

It was the realization that I could never again inhabit certainty in quite the same way.

The sentences came quickly, almost like a stream of consciousness. There was no pause to question what I was saying. What I was writing felt straightforward and factual, almost self-evident.

I finished the letter with the sense that I had said what needed to be said.

At the time, I wouldn’t have described this as believing something. It felt more like stating what was already the case.

Years later, while trying to reorganize a box of old correspondence, I came across an envelope with his name on it. Inside were several letters he had written in response

One in particular stood out. In it, he said that after reading my letter, he had thought what a loss it was to the Catholic Church that I had not become a priest.

“It’s your church’s gain,” he wrote, “but our loss.”

I remember reading that and recognizing something familiar in it. The same sense of certainty that had been present when I wrote to him was reflected back to me in his reply.

Looking back, that period of my life carried a particular momentum. Situations were addressed and resolved. Questions led to answers that felt complete and final.

That didn’t remain.

I watched the wife of a close friend load her minivan with belongings, her three children beside her, and drive away from the home they had shared for twelve years.

There had been no visible break, no noticeable conflict. One day she was there, the next she was gone. Where had she gone? What would happen to her and her children?

I remember standing there, waiting for some way to understand what had happened. Thoughts began to form, but they didn’t settle in the way they once would have. Nothing fully closed around it.

That wasn’t an isolated moment.

I began to notice it in other situations. During that period, questions arose that the answers I had once taken as complete no longer settled. The familiar sense of resolution didn’t come.

At one point, after an experience that brought up strong physical and emotional reactions, I sat with someone who offered a way to understand it.

As he spoke, I could feel something well-known beginning again, the movement to organize what had happened into something that could be understood and settled.

I started to follow it, with the sense it might take me somewhere I hadn’t been able to reach before.

It felt like it might finally come together.

Then I stopped.

Not because it didn’t make sense. Not because it was wrong.

But because the same movement was there again, the pull to be taken somewhere I hadn’t been able to reach before.

I saw the movement itself.

The attempt to resolve, to fix.

That movement was there again.

And with it, everything I had turned to before.

It was all there.

But it no longer held.

Over time, other things began to fall away.

Books once cherished no longer held my attention. Programs and podcasts that once promised to lead somewhere no longer held their pull.

What remained was not a new conclusion, but no conclusion.

And yet, nothing else seemed to stop.

Conversations continued. Decisions were made. The day moved as it always had.

What was no longer there was the sense that something still needed to be settled.

I’m sitting at my desk again now, writing this.

The same movements are still here. Thoughts form. Words appear. Memories come and go.

But they don’t land in the same way.

What stands out is not how that earlier certainty disappeared.

What stands out is that it is no longer here.

And there is no clear sense that it needs to return.

Just this, as it is, in the middle of an ordinary moment.

It’s not just about the rope. You're watching how the cowboy works with its motion without forcing it. It may look like it’s all in the wrist, but the whole body has to be aligned just right to keep those loops from collapsing to the ground, going slack and lifeless. The rope tends to follow when it’s handled just right.

The wind doesn’t respond in quite the same way.

No cowboy in his right mind would try to lasso the wind with his rope, would he?

Human ingenuity has found ways to harness the wind through sails, windmills, wind turbines, and gliders, but it cannot be captured or controlled. It can only be influenced, channeled, and adapted. It moves on its own terms, not ours.

And yet, that doesn’t stop us, does it? We look for methods, techniques, breakthrough moments, and new information, trying to get somewhere else, moving beyond where we currently stand.

We aren’t talking here about business acumen, time management, or career-track programs, which can all be measured and improved through the implementation of proven strategies. This is something else.

In those areas, progress is enhanced by controlling clear inputs, monitoring measurable outputs, and producing repeatable gains. But what if what we’re touching here doesn’t yield to control at all?

Is there a way this “wind” can be experienced as it is, without trying to harness it, control it, or influence it? What might that be like, not trying to get somewhere else, but remaining within what already is?

Or do we find ourselves trying to locate it, name it, describe it, and sort out what it can and cannot do?

If I had followed that path, much of my life would have been structured in advance. I would still have faced the question of how to live, but it would have unfolded within a shared framework rather than one I had to construct alone.

Some people say they knew from a young age what they wanted to do and simply followed it. Maybe they are fortunate in that way. For many of us, though, there is no clear path. We are left to piece things together ourselves, deciding what matters without a common map. That was certainly true for me.

For much of history, that burden was carried differently. Religious traditions offered shared beliefs and practices that oriented a person’s life. They did not remove uncertainty, but they gave it a shape and a place. This was my experience while living for decades inside a tradition that helped me better understand the meaning of my life and my place in the world.

Today, that shared framework has largely given way to something else: a world where the individual is responsible for determining meaning, truth, and purpose. You can hear it in the language we use. We are told to find our purpose, do what we love, and build a life that feels authentic. I first noticed this back in the early 1970s, with the sudden surge in popularity of self-help books, seminars, and workshops that emphasized self-discovery and personal development.

What are we already living inside of?

We move through daily life under these assumptions so naturally that they rarely come into view. They shape how we think, choose, and judge what matters, often without our noticing. I rarely questioned it.

Even our deepest questions—why am I here, what is the purpose of life—are asked from within this same self-referential frame. I remember sitting in a field overlooking a valley, asking myself what my life meant, and realizing that no shared answer was waiting for me. Whatever answer I arrived at would have to be my own.

What are we living inside of?

People respond to this in different ways. Some turn toward religious communities, where belief and practice offer a way to receive answers rather than construct them alone. I can see the appeal in that, especially in contrast to the endless stream of systems, programs, and advice all promising clarity or transformation.

Others take a different route, identifying as spiritual but not religious. They tend to distrust large institutions, especially religious ones, and place authority within personal experience. I have felt that pull as well, the desire for meaning without submission to something that feels imposed from the outside.

Still others approach these questions without reference to any higher authority, or remain uncertain about whether such answers can be known at all. And many people, occupied with work and relationships, rarely dwell on these questions in explicit terms. Even when I was fully immersed in pursuing a spiritual path, I often found little time outside of working and raising a family to focus on such concerns.

But across all these differences, the underlying situation remains the same: we are expected to determine for ourselves what is true, what matters, and how to live.

Before trying to answer those questions, it may be worth seeing that situation more clearly and recognizing how much it already shapes our answers.

At around ten years old, my Nana would sometimes take me to our local Catholic church on Saturday mornings to visit the fourteen “Stations of the Cross.” For those of you who didn’t grow up in the Catholic faith, the Stations of the Cross are a devotional practice that retraces the final events of Jesus Christ’s life, from his condemnation to his crucifixion and burial. Here’s how those visits went.

Starting at the back of the church, we would stand in front of station number one. On the wall in front of us hung a framed panel with bas-relief figures and scenes, sculpted in a plaster-like material that projected outward from the surface. Seven stations lined the left side of the church, and seven lined the right.

Holding my Nana’s hand, she would begin praying in a whisper, barely audible, for about thirty seconds. Then we would move on to the next station and do the same. This continued until we had prayed at all fourteen.

As we moved from one station to the next, Nana would explain that Jesus was being mistreated by people who did not know that God was living inside him. I remember feeling a sense of awe as I looked at each scene, wondering how one man could affect so many lives. I also remember thinking that God must be sad to see Jesus being treated this way.

Why was he treated so badly?

What did he do wrong?

Growing up in America in the 1950s through the late 1960s, I assumed God’s existence as a living reality, a fact of life. God was alive in the “heavens,” and He was always around in my life, up to and including punishing me for my bad deeds. (Ouch.)

During this time, broadly speaking, that orientation was shared across much of American culture. The prevailing Protestant-Catholic-Jewish consensus held that God exists, human beings are morally accountable to God, the universe has inherent meaning, and religion plays a legitimate role in public life. Differences certainly existed, yet these traditions largely agreed that the universe is a sacred, ordered reality, and that human beings occupy a defined place within it.

Today, holding such a view about God or the cosmos can seem peculiar or impractical, like reaching for a long-forgotten home rotary phone to call your best friend, only to realize the world no longer works that way, especially if you grew up in the 1990s or beyond.

Back when I was growing up, our rotary phone sat on the end table next to our living room sofa. If it rang, whoever was nearby answered it. Conversations took place within earshot of others in the room. Calls were often short because someone else might need to use the phone. If you called someone and they weren’t home, you waited. Communication belonged, in a sense, to the household. And in the house I grew up in, with seven siblings, there were plenty of fights over access to the phone.

Over time, that familiar rotary phone got replaced by the touch-tone keypad phone. Because my dad worked for the old New York Bell Telephone Company, he was able to get us one of these new phones, which he mounted on the wall in our kitchen. We were amazed at how quick and easy it was to dial a phone number using this keypad, compared with the slow turn of the rotary dial and its steady clicking as it returned to where it started, replaced now by a series of quick electronic beeps.

A few weeks later, our dad came home with what seemed like a magical device, a thirty-foot extension cord that made it possible to stretch the phone receiver all the way down the hallway and around the corner toward the bedrooms. I can still recall pulling that cord down the hallway and around the corner, trying to find a quiet place to talk with my girlfriend.

Then came the invention of the cordless phone. Walking around the house without having to stand next to the phone, or worrying about pulling the phone off the wall by yanking the extension cord too hard, felt like a whole new level of freedom in the house. But the landline touch-tone phone was still, largely, the reliable go-to phone, because reception on these early cordless phones was often spotty.

As reception improved, these personal mobile phones began to shift communication away from a location-specific, shared setting toward something more private and individualized. The cordless phone freed people from being tied to a single place, but it had not yet become the center of daily life, still largely limited to phone calls and rudimentary texting. That shift would come with the arrival of the smartphone.

This expansion was already underway with the rise of the home personal computer and early internet, and later with the portable laptop, though each remained something one had to sit down to access. I can still remember in the early 1990s opening up my IBM Butterfly laptop and dialing up an internet connection via AOL (anyone else remember?).

In 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, what we once used only occasionally became something we could carry with us and access at all times. Communication, information, and interpretation moved into the same device, available almost instantly and in private. Over time, this not only increased access but also created a more continuous form of engagement, where the flow of information and perspectives became constant and varied.

Today, many of us use this device from the moment we wake to the moment we drift off to sleep. (I confess, guilty as charged.) New patterns of attention, habits of behavior, and increasingly, how we understand ourselves and the world around us are shaped by it.

What began as unlimited, private, individual freedom to access the world via the smartphone has, in some cases, become full immersion in a highly speculative digital sphere. Now, with AI, the phone begins to take on a role in our thinking, offering interpretations that shape how we understand our experience and, increasingly, how we understand ourselves.

What was once held within a shared and structured phone culture has gradually morphed into something far more individualized, continuous, and private. Where communication once took place within a common space, shaped by visibility and informal accountability, it now occurs largely in seclusion, on demand, and without the same shared reference points. This creates a new set of conditions in which each person is increasingly responsible for managing a constant flow of input, interpretation, and response, largely on their own.

Just as the evolution of the phone gradually shifted communication away from a shared, visible, and structured setting into something more individualized, continuous, and private, a corresponding change has taken place in how we try to make sense of our lives.

We are now expected, almost as a rite of passage, to figure out for ourselves what is true, what matters, and how to live. Where we once believed we were held by something larger than ourselves, a world understood to be divinely ordered, where direction was already given, we now see ourselves floating in a sea of limitless possibilities, none of which arrive with any shared sense of what to trust or how to proceed.

And so the responsibility shifts, often quietly but profoundly, onto the individual to sort, interpret, and decide. This pressure to navigate our lives, almost as if we have to invent a compass to direct ourselves, can become all-consuming and exhausting. The question of where we actually stand and what kind of world we are moving within remains largely out of view.

What matters, then, is not simply how to navigate this ever-widening field of conflicting options, but whether we have first taken the time to understand where we stand within it. Before deciding what to believe, what to pursue, or how to change, there is a prior task, one that is easily overlooked in a world that encourages relentless forward movement and continual response.

This is what we might call the task of orientation. Of coming to see, as clearly as we can, the ground we stand on and the conditions we live in. Without that, even the best forms of navigation may lead us in circles, like our pet dog chasing its proverbial tail.

The deeper challenge, then, is not simply to move with greater discernment within the field of conflicting options, but to see more clearly the field itself, how it is structured, what it assumes, and how it quietly shapes what feels possible, necessary, or true.

Orientation does not solve the problem of how to live, but it changes the ground on which that question is asked. And without that shift, we may continue navigating, even successfully, without ever quite knowing where we are or where we are headed.

Yet many of our difficulties in life arise from something we might call certainty inflation.

What’s that, you might ask?

A few years ago, while riding on the train with a friend of mine, we got into a conversation about what God is like, or what He is not like. He shared an experience in which the creator of all things, God, directly spoke to him, reassuring him that he is loved beyond measure. It was God’s voice, he claimed, that he heard inside his innermost being, and this unmistakable voice of God instantly flooded his whole body with a feeling of bliss and a “peace that passeth all understanding.”

At this particular time in my life, I was leaning more towards the perspective that such an idea was akin to a young child believing in the existence of Santa Claus. I started wriggling in my seat, feeling more and more agitated as he talked on about this loving God who spoke to him as a human father would speak to his children. I challenged him, and with arms flailing about, insisted that what he was saying about God was a figment of his imagination. My attitude was: How can you believe something so stupid? You fool!

Certainty inflation is what happens when confidence becomes identity, and disagreement feels like a threat.

You see, I once held the same notion about God that my friend was still holding: that God is like a loving father who wants to have a personal relationship with me. I can talk with Him, and He can talk with me. I can pray to Him, and if I try hard enough, God can answer my prayers. I lived in this identity for decades, and was convinced I knew what I was talking about! In fact, I told myself the trouble in the world was a direct result of human beings not holding the same view I held about this God.

As for my friend, we were close enough not to let this disagreement about God create a wedge in our relationship. Over the years of our growing friendship, we built up enough social currency to acknowledge that each of us was bigger than any particular strongly held viewpoint, which could potentially result in a serious friendship rupture.

Looking back on this scene, I can laugh as I see in my mind’s eye the cocky, self-assured attitude I held, as if I could possess the correct or true viewpoint on what God is and is not, or on any other topic, for that matter. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in human relationships or between unlike groups, cultures, or countries. Today I can see that what I carried that day was my own version of inflation certainty.

Whether it’s about politics, religion, environment, cultures, or whatever, the seeming need to be right or on the right side is not going to go away anytime soon. But what happens when we reduce life to stances of right versus wrong, good versus bad, truth versus lies? Do these attitudes and postures foster understanding and cooperation, or something else?

When we are so certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, are we expanding or contracting? Do we get bigger or smaller? If we feel the need to take a stance of “I’m right on this, and that’s it!” toward anything going on in the world, does this create more stability or fragmentation in ourselves or in relation to others?

What happens to curiosity, humility, surprise, and the capacity to be changed when we rush to explain and feel the urge to win?

Is there dignity in admitting to not knowing the answer?

In our current climate of social media platforming for clicks and likes, and the availability of instant information through AI, are we able to admit, with a calm, non-hurried presence, that as limited beings, we will never fully know or understand everything about anything?

What if our deepest strength lies in not knowing?

What if certainty is not what holds us together but keeps us apart from one another?