Mandelbrot
On a recent flight back to my home city, I played Battleship with Hamza. Two grids, hidden boats, and you take turns calling out coordinates. B4. Miss. D7. Hit. You drop bombs blindly onto a map, hoping to strike something before your opponent strikes you. Hamza celebrated every hit with the joy only a child can muster for destruction that isn’t real.
Now debris is falling on the city I have called home for the past decade. Interception booms echo at night. And I find myself thinking about that grid, about being a boat, sitting still, while coordinates are called somewhere far away. The odds aren’t the same as a board game, but the logic is. Randomness. Chance. The terrible democracy of shrapnel, which does not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent.
I have been here before.
Familiar Ground
In the late 2000s, I lived through a season of bomb blasts. They came every other week, sometimes more. I was young, early in my career, and twice I found myself close enough to feel the pressure wave before I heard the sound. What I remember most is the silence afterward, not real silence, but the silence inside your head when your ears are ringing and your brain hasn’t caught up.
For months, I was scared of Friday prayers. The mosque felt like a target. I would look for a corner to pray in, positioning myself against a wall, reasoning; if you can call it reason, that I was reducing the probability of shrapnel reaching me from multiple directions. I was trying to speak to God while calculating geometry.
This is what uncertainty does when it escalates beyond abstraction. It colonizes your thinking. It makes you calculate angles of fragmentation while trying to submit to the divine.
Irritable Reaching
The poet John Keats had a name for a capacity I did not possess in those days. In 1817, he wrote about what separated Shakespeare from lesser minds:
"…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
The phrase that matters is irritable reaching. That is what I was doing in the mosque. Reaching for a sense of control that geometry could not provide. Reaching for a way to make the unbearable feel manageable.
Keats wasn’t describing passivity. He was describing a discipline. The ability to remain in uncertainty without lunging for false resolution. To let mystery stay mysterious until it reveals itself on its own terms.
Fighting Reality
The instinct never fully leaves you. It waits dormant until uncertainty sharpens, then resurfaces with familiar urgency. You scroll. You refresh. You chase every headline, every official statement, every unverified rumor; convinced that somewhere in the noise is the one piece of information that will finally grant you safety.
It won’t come. In Lahore, I didn’t know this yet. I was young and thought vigilance was the same as control. It took markets to teach me otherwise, years later, sitting with positions that moved against me, learning the hard way that when you argue with the tape, when you insist the market is wrong and you are right, you bleed. The suffering was never in reality. It was in the war I waged against it. Only when I stopped fighting what was actually happening did my mind begin to clear.
I am a believer. I bow my head to the one any only I cannot see, which means I must also accept outcomes I cannot foresee or truly comprehend. History moves under a hand steadier than any general’s, wiser than any statesman’s calculus. I do not need to decode the logic of nations. My task is simpler and harder: to remain upright while the ground shifts.
This is not surrender. It is the only posture that keeps me useful. Faith has never promised to dissolve fear; only to hold it in place, to keep it from flooding the rooms where I need to think clearly. The weight in my chest is not failure. It is proof that I have not yet calcified, that the images still reach me. What matters now is where I point that weight: toward prayer, toward giving, toward holding space for those who woke up this morning to a life unrecognizable from the one they had yesterday.
What They Watch
I have failed at this before.
When COVID arrived, Hamza was young and Anya not yet born. I told myself I was staying informed. In truth, I was drowning in the scroll. Hours lost to case counts and projections, my nervous system hijacked by strangers on the internet. I was short with Sana. I snapped at Hamza for small things that didn’t matter. I thought I was managing the crisis. I was just marinating in it.
Hamza didn’t understand the virus. But he understood that his father was afraid, distracted, quick to anger. He absorbed the static in our home the way children absorb everything; silently, completely.
Now there are two of them. They watch my face. They read my tone. They don’t understand what’s happening in the sky, but they know when their father is on edge. From me they are learning whether the world is something you navigate or something that swallows you whole.
I cannot make the sky safe. I cannot offer them certainty I don’t have. But I can do better than I did before. I can show them that fear and steadiness can share the same body. That you can be afraid and still be present. That the news can wait until they’re asleep.
This is what negative capability looks like when it leaves the page and enters your household. It means protecting your nervous system so you can protect theirs. It means refusing to consume war as spectacle. It means staying anchored when every instinct says reach; because they are watching, and what they see will shape how they meet uncertainty for the rest of their lives.
The Practice
Keats was writing about poetry; about what allowed Shakespeare to inhabit contradiction without forcing resolution. But the principle travels. It reaches into markets, where the discomfort of not knowing drives terrible decisions. It reaches into parenting, where the urge to promise false safety damages more than it protects. And it reaches into nights like these, when you are, whether you like it or not, one of the boats on the grid.
The question is whether you can sit there, capable of being in uncertainties, without reaching for something that won’t hold.
Most nights, I’m still learning how.