A brief guide to living your life while everything is a bit of a mess.

I was in the supermarket the other day, standing in front of the yoghurt fridge for far too long, trying to remember which one everyone in the house will actually eat, phone in one hand, cold air spilling out every time someone opened the door beside me, while a news headline flashed up that made my stomach drop a bit.

And there I was, holding a yoghurt, thinking how strange it is that you can be worrying about something as small as what to buy for the week while also carrying something much bigger that you can’t do anything about.

There’s this low-level hum to everything at the moment, a constant stream of updates, uncertainty, things shifting in ways we can’t quite get a handle on, and even when you’re just getting on with normal life, packing lunches or answering emails or standing in a supermarket aisle, it doesn’t really leave you, it just sits there in the background.

And so, obviously, the very reasonable and entirely understandable response to all of this is to think: right, I’ll sort myself out when things calm down a bit. When the world stops being quite so aggressively itself.

I understand this instinct. I really do. We want solid ground before we make changes. We want to feel like we’re not building something on top of something that might shift underneath us. This is not unreasonable. This is, in fact, quite sensible.

But here’s the awkward truth.

What if things don’t settle in the way you’re hoping?

Because if you look back, there’s always been something. Some uncertainty, some unfinished business, something not quite right, even when it looked calmer on the surface. There is no version of life where everything is finally sorted and the timing is perfect and the ground is completely solid. I have been waiting for that version of life for quite some time now and I can tell you, it has not shown up.

And if you keep waiting for the moment where everything feels calm enough to finally start living properly, you might be waiting for something that doesn’t actually exist.

That doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening. It matters, of course it does. But there’s a difference between being aware of the world and quietly handing your whole life over to it. These are not the same thing, even though they can feel like it at three in the morning.

Because while all of this is going on, your life is still happening. In the middle of the uncertainty, in the middle of the unfinished bits, in the middle of things not feeling entirely okay. And you are still allowed to take up space inside that. To finally look at the thing you’ve been circling for five years. To take one of those ideas that keeps coming back and actually do something with it, even if you don’t know exactly where it’s going yet. To admit that the career you fell into isn’t the one you actually want, which, by the way, more people feel than you’d think. To finally leave the WhatsApp group. To start untangling the thing that keeps snagging, even if you can’t quite name it yet. Small decisions that move things forward, even when the ground still feels a bit wobbly.

Not in a forced, relentlessly positive kind of way. Just in a quiet, honest, this-is-the-reality-and-I’m-still-here kind of way.

You don’t need the world to calm down completely before you begin. You just need to decide that this, as it is, is enough to take one small step from.

Because waiting for everything to feel okay before you start living properly is a very convincing plan. It sounds sensible. It sounds responsible. But it quietly keeps your life on hold.

And your life is already happening.

P.S. Season 2 of our podcast, In This Together, is out in the world and episode one has just landed. We’ve started gently, as you do, with death, dying, and the afterlife. We talk about grief, faith, existential psychology, fear of death, spiritual experiences, and the way mortality has a habit of stripping life back to what really matters. We also get into the tension between religion and belonging, especially when faith traditions haven’t always felt safe or welcoming, and how each of us has ended up making our own meaning around what comes after this life. Have a listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.