Approved.

I enter my reference number on the Indian visa website.
The status loads.
Approved.

My mouth falls open. Not because I truly believed my application might be rejected. I haven’t leaked state secrets. I haven’t killed anyone. The most criminal act of my life was stealing a lollipop when I was six – and I felt so guilty that I brought it back.

And yet, this single word does something to me.
Now it is official. No longer a passing thought, easily pushed aside. An authority—the authority—has agreed that I am allowed.

And with that, it becomes clear: I am really flying to India.
Tears rise. Everything inside me is laughing.

---

I spend the following weeks preparing. Old habits rush to my aid: writing lists, working my way through travel guides from the city library, reading personal accounts, watching YouTube videos.

Along the way, I learn—among other things—that my tried-and-tested travel wardrobe, minimalist and perfectly coordinated, will not work for India. Too much shoulder. Too much leg. Too much décolletage.
For an entire week, I spiral cheerfully, trying to figure out what is culturally appropriate without feeling disguised. I even build a mood board. Don’t worry—I smile at myself, too.

---

When it comes to India itself, I soon drop all further research. The scale, the abundance—it overwhelms me. More than that, I recognize an old pattern: trying to mask uncertainty through excessive preparation.

And this is where I pause.

Because uncertainty has become something we are no longer trained to endure.

We live in a time that promises answers for everything, preferably immediately. A time that mistakes information for safety and preparation for control. If we know enough—so the unspoken agreement goes—we will be spared discomfort. If we plan well enough, nothing will truly touch us. Uncertainty, in this logic, is not a natural state of being human, but a flaw to be eliminated.

And resist it with all the tools we have learned to rely on. We fill every gap with data. We prepare excessively. We research obsessively. We rehearse conversations that may never happen. We try to outrun the discomfort of not knowing by staying constantly busy, constantly informed, constantly one step ahead of a future that keeps shifting anyway. We predict, optimize, simulate. We track our steps, our sleep, our moods. We google symptoms before they have fully formed. We read reviews before we trust our own curiosity. We scroll not because we are interested, but because stillness has become suspicious. Empty space feels like a problem that needs solving.

Perhaps this is why uncertainty feels so unbearable now: because we have unlearned how to be with it.

Uncertainty asks for something that no app can provide. It asks us to stay present without guarantees. To stand in a moment that has not yet decided what it will become. To resist the urge to close the door too early, just to stop the draft.

There was a time when uncertainty was woven into daily life. When seasons decided more than calendars, when journeys could not be tracked, when outcomes were stories told after the fact, not forecasts delivered in advance. Today, we demand previews. We want to know how things will end before we allow them to begin.

And yet, meaning has never lived in certainty.

The most formative moments of our lives—love, loss, change—rarely arrive with instructions. They come unannounced. They disrupt. They refuse to explain themselves. Uncertainty is not the enemy of these moments; it is their birthplace.

And the body remembers first. It knows when preparation turns into tension. When planning hardens into armor. When control begins to choke rather than protect. It speaks through tight throats and shallow breath, through restless nights and clenched jaws. It reminds us—quietly at first, then more insistently—that uncertainty cannot be solved. It can only be lived.

There is a particular courage in allowing uncertainty to remain open. In not rushing to name it, tame it, neutralize it. In letting questions breathe without forcing answers. This courage is not loud. It does not announce itself. It often looks like stillness. Like waiting. Like choosing not to know—yet.

Uncertainty creates space. And space is where transformation happens.

Only when we stop filling every moment with certainty do we allow something unexpected to enter. A different path. A new understanding. A version of ourselves we could not have planned for, because it only exists on the other side of not knowing.

To endure uncertainty is to trust that clarity will come—not because we hunted it down, but because we stayed long enough for it to reveal itself. It is an act of faith, not in outcomes, but in process. In life’s quiet intelligence. In the idea that not everything that matters can be anticipated.

Perhaps this is what surrender truly means. Not giving up, but loosening the grip. Allowing the future to approach us instead of chasing it into submission. Letting uncertainty be what it has always been: not a threat, but an invitation.

An invitation to listen more closely.
To breathe more deeply.
To meet life where it actually is—unfinished, unresolved, alive.

---

Seen through this lens, my preparation suddenly feels unnecessary. Even constricting. I allow the uncertainty to be there. I loosen the alarmingly tight grip that has been closing around my throat for days. And for the first time in a while, I can breathe again.

In that breath, I open myself to endless possibilities.
And to India.

---

Four days before my departure, the world is dusted with powdered sugar. Laughing, I trudge through twenty centimeters of snow—utterly unaware of what awaits me, thanks to this unexpected return of winter.