Life is meant to be full of curiosity, not certainty.
I liked the sentence when I wrote it. It felt true.
I was having a conversation with a sixteen-year-old student who had reached out after one of my school visits. She was anxious about whether neurosurgery was really the career for her and whether the uncertainty she felt meant she was not committed enough to pursue it.
Sixteen years old, already thinking about committing herself to one of the most demanding careers imaginable.
What struck me was not that she was ambitious. Ambition at that age can be wonderful. It was the burden she seemed to feel to already know, to have enough certainty now about a decision that could shape decades of her life.
We do this to young people all the time. We ask them what they want to become before they have had enough experiences to know. We reward confident answers. We mistake certainty for maturity. Then we act surprised when they become anxious about not having everything figured out.
So I told her that life is meant to be full of curiosity, not certainty.
The more I have thought about that sentence, though, the more I have wondered whether I am willing to live by it myself.
It is easy to tell a sixteen-year-old not to worry about having everything figured out. We can remind students that careers change, interests evolve, opportunities emerge, and identities develop over time. We can tell them to explore, experiment, ask better questions, and resist the pressure to decide too early who they are going to become.
Adults are much less forgiving of uncertainty in our own lives.
We want the five-year plan. We want the strategy. We want clarity about the next move. We want the promotion to lead somewhere, the investment to produce something, the relationship to have a defined future, the business decision to have an expected return.
We tell young people to remain curious while spending much of our own lives trying to reduce the number of surprises.
That contradiction has become harder for me to ignore lately because the past month has removed more of the usual certainties from my own life than I am accustomed to.
I sold my house. Most of what I own is in storage. I no longer have an address I instinctively write down on a form. I have been moving through hotels, Airbnbs, work trips, school visits, airports, and neighborhoods without knowing exactly when I will settle into something more permanent again.
Some people have called that brave. I am not sure bravery is the word I would use.
Mostly, it has required becoming more comfortable with not knowing.
For most of my adult life, many of the basic questions had answers. I had a home, familiar roads, familiar stores, familiar routines. I traveled constantly, but travel happened against the backdrop of a life that remained fixed somewhere else. There was always a place to return to.
Only after removing some of those fixed points have I started noticing how much of adulthood is devoted to creating them.
We build routines, buy homes, accumulate savings, develop expertise, return to familiar places, choose familiar brands, surround ourselves with people who know us, and organize our days around patterns we can trust. There is nothing wrong with any of that. Predictability makes life manageable and gives us a sense of control in a world where control is never complete.
But somewhere along the way, we can begin to confuse knowing what comes next with knowing how to live.
Over the past month, I have found myself saying yes to things I might once have filtered out because they did not fit neatly into a plan. A short trip to Mysore to visit two schools would once have seemed inefficient. Going anyway changed how I understood the opportunity there and reminded me how easily certainty can become a filter. We begin evaluating the unfamiliar through assumptions formed by what we already know.
That has made me wonder how often we call something inefficient simply because it falls outside the pattern we understand.
Curiosity is rarely neat.
It asks us to spend time on conversations that may lead nowhere, visit places that may not produce an immediate outcome, explore an idea without knowing whether it will become useful, and meet people without first deciding what role they might play in our lives.
That can feel wasteful in a world increasingly obsessed with optimization.
Yet many of the meaningful things in our lives begin without a clear return on investment.
Even the mundane parts of the past month have reminded me how quickly the unfamiliar becomes familiar. A new neighborhood in Bengaluru required me to figure out where to eat, where to buy fruit, where to get coffee. Within days, those things had become routine.
We usually experience familiarity as though it has always existed and forget that nearly every comfortable part of our lives once began as something we did not know.
Being back in Bengaluru also brought me face to face with places I had once attached enormous meaning to. At eighteen, preparing to leave India for university, I remember believing that certain experiences were ending for good. Thirty-five years later, I can see how confidently I misunderstood what was ending and what would continue in forms I could not possibly have imagined.
Maybe that is one reason certainty deserves more suspicion than we give it.
We want to know, while we are living something, whether it is a beginning, an ending, a mistake, an opportunity, a detour, or a turning point.
Most of the time, we only know later.
The insignificant conversation becomes a friendship. The disappointing rejection changes our direction. The job we thought would define us becomes a short chapter. The city we planned to visit becomes home. The plan we were certain about disappears.
Life keeps refusing to organize itself according to the meaning we assign to it in real time.
And yet we keep demanding certainty from ourselves and from each other.
We want students to know their careers at sixteen. We want leaders to have immediate answers to problems that are still unfolding. We want five-year plans in a world that can change in five months. We often interpret hesitation as weakness and changing one’s mind as inconsistency.
There is tremendous comfort in knowing.
I understand that comfort. I am still someone who likes plans. I like calendars, strategies, goals, systems, and knowing where I am going. I have no desire to turn uncertainty into some kind of virtue or make life unnecessarily difficult.
But I am beginning to think certainty can become limiting when it closes off curiosity too soon.
Once we are sure, we explore less. We listen less. We stop examining assumptions because they have hardened into conclusions. We reject trips that do not fit the calendar, ideas that do not fit the strategy, and lives that do not fit the version of ourselves we have already decided to maintain.
A life built around certainty can become remarkably efficient.
It can also become remarkably narrow.
The past few weeks have made me more aware of how much can appear once the plan loosens its grip. A trip gets taken. A neighborhood becomes familiar. An old memory takes on new meaning. A conversation leads somewhere unexpected. A life that seemed to require an address turns out to remain grounded without one.
I do not know how long I will live this way. I assume there will eventually be another place that becomes familiar, another routine that takes shape, another address I can write without thinking.
What I hope I do not lose is the curiosity that has come with not knowing.
Maybe the challenge of adulthood is not to eliminate uncertainty from our lives, but to become secure enough in ourselves that uncertainty does not immediately feel like something that needs to be solved.
I told that student that life is meant to be full of curiosity, not certainty.
The longer I live, the more I suspect I was reminding myself too.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
