I was having lunch with a couple of friends a few weeks ago and, as often happens these days, the conversation drifted toward the situation. They both have young children, which gives every discussion about the future a different weight. As I wrote in an earlier post, I am curious, but it is hard to stay optimistic.
But the truth is more complicated. There is a line from Rumi I love: “After evening comes night, and after night comes the dawn.” That is how it feels to me. We are still in the evening. The night is approaching. And yes, eventually, there will be a dawn.
So I am optimistic, but only if you stretch the timeline far enough. In the short term, though, I do not like the direction we are moving in, and I worry it is the wrong one. And, frankly, I know enough human beings not to trust them (yep, sometimes my lawyerish side kicks in…). I trust our nature, not our actions. There are wonderful exceptions everywhere, but money, power, and ego have a way of bending us toward choices that are anything but noble.
Whether we are talking about war, artificial intelligence, geopolitics, climate change, or values, the pattern repeats itself. Uncertainty, instability, volatility. At times it feels as if the only honest way to describe our era is VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Flexibility is turning into a daily discipline rather than a skill. And on top of that lies a sense of a slippery slope, the feeling that we are sliding downward at speed and no one seems to know how to slow the descent, let alone redirect it.
After my little monologue, one of my friends laughed and said, “So you are betting on chaos?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “sounds like it.”
And the more I think about it, the more it seems that of all the things one could bet on, chaos might be the most rational.
Because what if chaos is not a variable at all, but a constant?
Maybe that is the quiet shift I have been sensing lately. Not the fear of chaos, but the recognition that it has always been part of the landscape and will probably be even more present in the months ahead. Patient, structural, woven into the fabric of our world. And if chaos is a constant, then our responsibility is not to eliminate it but to learn how to move through it with a little more clarity.
To choose curiosity over paralysis. To hold attention over noise. To prefer small, deliberate actions over grand illusions of control.
And perhaps that is the real bet. Not on chaos itself, which does not need our permission to exist, but on our ability to orient ourselves inside it. On the possibility that meaning, however fragile, can still take root in uncertain soil.
