Don’t Chase the Fog

On the exhaustion of trying to think our way out of every fear

Don’t go trying to capture fog with a butterfly net.

I wish someone had said that to me years ago. I have spent more hours than I care to admit trying to catch what could not be held: a conversation that had already ended, a future that had not arrived, another person’s feelings that I could only guess at, an answer God had not yet given me.

I would rehearse the problem, then rehearse my response to it. I would imagine what might happen, then react emotionally to the thing I had imagined. By the time real life asked anything of me, I was already worn out.

There is a kind of stress that comes from an actual event. A difficult conversation. A bill that must be paid. A loss that must be grieved. That stress asks something of us, and sometimes it asks a great deal. But there is another burden we create when we live the same trouble over and over in our minds. The event may happen once; our fear makes it happen a hundred times.

I do not mean that we should refuse to think. Thought can help us understand a problem, seek counsel, make a plan, and take the next faithful step. But we usually know when thought has stopped helping. We return to the same scene without learning anything new. We search for certainty where none is available. We call it preparation, though it leaves us less prepared and less present.

Sometimes we are not solving a problem at all. We are trying to control a feeling.

That is where the fog comes in. We cannot grab hold of uncertainty. We cannot make someone love us by rehearsing the perfect sentence in our heads. We cannot make tomorrow reveal itself because we have sacrificed another night’s sleep to imagining it. The net swings, the fog moves, and we grow tired.

In the Soulprint Project, I often describe the Enneagram as a mirror of the ego. The mirror can show us the pattern beneath the pattern: why we keep returning to this particular fear, what loss we are trying to prevent, what story about ourselves we are desperate to prove or disprove. The point is not to give ourselves another reason to obsess. It is to notice what is happening with enough honesty to loosen its grip.

The Beatitudes invite a different posture. “Blessed are the poor in spirit” begins with our willingness to admit that we do not possess all the answers. “Blessed are those who mourn” gives us permission to feel an actual sorrow without turning it into endless speculation. “Blessed are the peacemakers” calls us, when the time comes, to do something that might bring peace into the world beyond our thoughts.

And contemplation teaches us to be still long enough to recognize the difference between a thought and a command. A frightening possibility can pass through the mind without becoming the truth. We can notice it, breathe, pray, and return to the life in front of us. Silence does not always deliver the answer we want. Sometimes it gives us the steadiness to live faithfully while the answer remains unclear.

Jesus asked, “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” (Matthew 6:27). He was not belittling the things people feared. He knew about hunger, vulnerability, betrayal, and death. His invitation was to attend to this day, where grace can meet us and where our choices can actually be made.

So when my mind begins another exhausting circuit, I am learning to ask three simple questions: What do I know? What can I do? What must I release?

If I know something, I can face it honestly. If I can do something, I can take one step, however small. If I cannot know or do anything more today, I can put down the net.

This is not indifference. It is trust practiced in the middle of uncertainty. It is refusing to spend all the strength needed for tomorrow on a battle that exists only in my imagination tonight.

The fog may still be there in the morning. But so will the ground beneath my feet. So will the person in front of me, the work entrusted to me, and the possibility that God can guide me one step at a time without first handing me a map of the entire road.

J. Steve Bruner
The Soulprint Project™