What I’ve noticed is that there are two main ways that fear of uncertainty affects us, at least initially. One is that we speed up and the other is that we get very lazy. As I’ve talked with people many of them share their experiences of how a basic level of nervousness causes them to speed about even in their own homes, bouncing from room to room and task to task and never quite finishing anything. People talk about going back and forth between one thing and another, emailing and calling people on the phone. …Lazy is the other way to go. It is the opposite of speed, and yet these two seeming opposites  are both about the same thing: avoiding being present with our fear of uncertainty. You procrastinate. You feel unworthy. Laziness has a frozen quality. You spend hour after hour on the computer, not as a form of speediness, but just distracting yourself, trying not to feel what’s underneath what you’re feeling, trying to avoid touching the uncertainty and uneasiness.

Pema Chodron

photo trishna datta