> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.meditationcourse.live/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Uncertainty, Impermanence and Change: Learning to Be at Home in a World That Never Stands Still - URL: https://www.meditationcourse.live/blog/uncertainty-impermanence-change/ - Published: 2026-11-07T08:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-07T09:00:54.000Z - Description: Why the brain struggles with uncertainty, how we invent certainty to cope, and how noticing impermanence in nature and regular practice help you feel at home with change. - Author: RobertMitchell - Tags: #blog-col, Insights, #newsletter-col ***Most of us only like the changes we choose. Here is why uncertainty keeps the mind so busy, and how mindfulness helps you feel at home in a world that never stands still.*** Ask a room full of people whether they like change, and you’ll get a mixed answer. Some will say they love it. But if you dig a little, you will find they usually mean that they like the changes they want to happen. A new job, a holiday, a car or a kitchen. Uninvited changes are a very different matter. The truth is, human beings really don’t like change. We want to get where we’re going without the uncertain bit in the middle. ## Evolutionary mismatch For most of human history, we learned our entire world from our parents and peers. You walked behind them and learned your bit of forest, mountain, seaside or desert in person, and intimately. Then your children learned it from you. The big trees lived for 600 years, and people lived for perhaps 60, so, with rare exceptions, the big trees were almost permanent and stood throughout your lifetime. The river flooded at the same time every year. Summer arrived at the same time every year. Life may have been hard, but it was predictable. We now live in a complex, fuzzy world, where uncertainty grows constantly. When we know an outcome, even a bad one, worry diminishes. The more uncertainty there is, the more active the brain becomes as it runs through the possibilities. It’s trying to make sense of something it did not evolve for. So it goes round and round. You wake up in the morning, and the uncertainty is in your head. You go to bed at night, or you wake up at three in the morning, and it is still there. This experience of something we haven’t evolved to live with is called evolutionary mismatch, and the more intensely mismatched we are, the greater the stress we experience, and the greater the chance of growing worry and anxiety. ## Inventing certainty One way to cope with uncertainty is to push for an outcome: the most likely outcome, the best possible, or the worst-case scenario. In fact, this is how governments and organisations model the future, so it makes logical sense, as long as you are aware that you’re doing it. A close relative of this is black-and-white thinking, where the brain creates dichotomies such as good and bad, right and wrong, fair and unfair, truth and lies, heroes and villains. People don’t choose this any more than they choose to worry or choose to feel anxious. It’s yet another evolutionary adaptation that doesn’t work well in the modern world, a bit like the stress response. The problem isn’t that we think in black and white. The problem is that we do it subconsciously, and life is invariably more nuanced than that. And then there is our inbuilt negativity bias, another survival trait that made perfect sense when a rustle in the grass might be a predator; expecting the worst might save our lives. But if we apply that to the endless deluge of uncertainty in the modern world, we can easily end up catastrophising. Forcing an outcome, black-and-white thinking and negativity bias are all ways of projecting certainty onto uncertainty. Researchers have identified this process in a paper named *The Neural Processes Underlying Self-Agency*. This goes a long way towards explaining why most of us are so risk-averse. Think about it this way. There are two paths to the top of a mountain: the one you know and the one you don’t. Why would you take the one you don’t? You could encounter all sorts of problems. It’s the same reason the soap powder adverts keep telling you what you already know. Certainty, certainty, certainty. When a new brand appears on the supermarket shelf, why would you risk your white shirts? Life, however, is a process of trial and error because there is no certainty to be had. So the question isn’t how to remove uncertainty. It’s how to become comfortable with it. ## Impermanence: the other side of the coin Impermanence is the constant flow of change. Uncertainty is what we feel when we try to predict where that flow will take us. They are two sides of the same coin, but the underlying process is always change. Comfort with uncertainty and recognising impermanence are powerful teachings in Buddhism. I’m not a Buddhist, but I can see their value, particularly when they are integrated with gratitude and compassion practices. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. A moment arises, events occur in that moment, and when the moment subsides, it’s gone forever. Many of us live quite separated from this, especially in towns and cities, where we are insulated from the cycle of life and death and live task-driven lives instead. ## Nature is the gentlest teacher Nature is a wonderful way to immerse yourself in recognising impermanence. If you look at an old log in a corner of the garden, you will see the beetles, fungi and woodlice making their home in it. Look at the flower heads wilting at the end of the season, and the leaves coming down every autumn. There’s nothing to be done about any of it, other than to recognise it when you see it. And that is mindfulness. You’re not trying to fix the falling leaf. You’re noticing it, and in noticing it, something in you starts to soften around the realisation of impermanence and how it permeates every single experience of your life. ## Why practice matters When I speak to non-meditators, they often perceive meditation as a clinical intervention, like pills or therapy. It is seen as something you pull out when bad stuff happens and then pack away again. That’s not what meditation is. If you’ve built a practice, and then a difficult change arrives, you discover that the practice has been quietly working for you all along. People who meditate regularly often notice that the skills they learned in their first adversity can help them get through the next one. Uncertainty and change are part of life, and they can be uncomfortable. But with practice, you will discover you have stopped fighting the current and started to feel at home in it. And there’s real freedom in that. If you would like a short, practical mindfulness idea in your inbox each week, [join our newsletter](https://www.meditationcourse.live/email-signup/). *Photo by Leo\_Visions on Unsplash.* ### Meditate with us live, four times a week The Meditation Course runs live guided classes on Zoom every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, with a growing library of courses. Membership gives you all of it. [See membership options](https://www.meditationcourse.live/membership/)