The Space That Holds Us: Trusting What We Cannot Control

There are days when life feels like a series of small negotiations — trying to make things work, to keep them aligned, to hold it all together. The mind strategizes, adjusts, anticipates, clings. Underneath it all hums a single question: What will happen if I let go?

For a long time, I lived as though my grip was the only thing holding the world in place. If I could plan well enough, work hard enough, stay careful enough, maybe I could keep chaos at bay. But life, in its quiet and unrelenting wisdom, has a way of reminding us that control is only ever partial — and often, an illusion.

When everything you’ve built starts to shift — when the relationship changes, the job dissolves, the path veers — the first instinct is to tighten. To resist. To brace against what’s coming. But control, I’ve learned, is a closed fist; it leaves no room for what might unfold.

Trust, on the other hand, is an open hand.

The more I sit with the flow of life — in meditation, in conversation, in the unpredictability of a single day — the more I see that we are constantly being held by something far greater than our plans. It’s the same force that turns breath into movement, seasons into renewal, endings into beginnings. Call it nature, awareness, or grace — it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s already here, doing the holding, whether we trust it or not.

I remember one evening on retreat, sitting in the dark meditation hall long after the session had ended. The others had left. The candles had burned low. I could hear only my breath and the quiet night insects outside. For the first time in weeks, I felt no need to direct my thoughts, no need to chase calm. I just sat there, aware of space — the space around me, the space within me. It was vast and steady, and it felt, unmistakably, like being held. Not by anyone, not by anything I could define, but by life itself.

In that moment, I understood something I’d read earlier on Meditation Life: “The same space that holds the stars holds you.”

Those words have stayed with me ever since. They remind me that we belong to something spacious — something that doesn’t need our control to remain whole.

To live from this understanding is an act of quiet courage. It means trusting that we can fall into the unknown and still be caught. It means allowing life to move without constantly reshaping it. It means recognizing that the ground beneath us has never actually disappeared — it’s just wider and deeper than we imagined.

Control can’t offer that kind of peace. It’s fragile by nature, dependent on the next success, the next certainty. Trust, though — real trust — lives in the body. It shows up as a deep exhale, a softening in the chest, a willingness to be exactly where we are.

When I pay attention, I notice that everything in nature lives this way. The trees don’t control the wind; they bend. The river doesn’t force its direction; it curves and carries on. Even the clouds, those great wanderers of the sky, change shape endlessly without resistance. Life itself is an unfolding, and our only true task is to let it move through us.

This doesn’t mean apathy or passivity. It means participating without gripping. Acting from presence rather than fear. Doing what we can, and then — crucially — letting go. There’s a deep kind of wisdom that arises when we stop trying to steer the river and instead learn to float.

Sometimes I practice this by noticing the space around my body. I close my eyes and feel how the air touches my skin, how sound moves through distance, how breath connects inside and out. It’s humbling — to realize that what we call “me” is held inside an endless field of aliveness. Even the thoughts that seem to define us come and go inside this greater space. Awareness itself is the container that holds everything.

And when we start to trust that container — that spaciousness of being — something softens. The need to know lessens. The anxiety of “what if” fades into the quiet rhythm of “what is.” We discover that control was never our real source of safety. Connection was.

So much of life is about learning to rest in what can’t be fixed or predicted — learning to breathe amid uncertainty. The practice, I think, is not to tighten the world until it feels stable, but to widen our awareness until we can hold the instability, too.

When I forget this — when fear returns, as it inevitably does — I come back to the simplest reminder: the space is still here. The breath still moves. The ground still holds. Even when everything feels uncertain, existence itself remains steady beneath it all.

To trust what we cannot control is to live in relationship with mystery. It’s to realize that safety doesn’t come from having answers, but from knowing that we belong to something vast enough to include all the questions.

So the next time life feels unsteady — when the plan unravels, the path shifts, or the heart aches for what’s unknown — pause. Feel the breath. Feel the space around you. Let the moment widen until you can sense it holding you.

Because it always is.

And in that recognition — in that letting go of control and falling into trust — you may discover the most profound truth of all: that what you’ve been trying to hold was never separate from what was already holding you.