Jan 1st, and the old urge to be uncertain

January 1st, and the old urge to be uncertain

New Year’s Day has a way of asking for clean lines:

• new goals
• new habits
• new clarity

But the older I get, the more I notice how quickly “clarity” can become a performance. Something we say out loud so the year feels controllable.

Most of life does not feel like a checklist. It feels like a moving surface. You take a step, the world shifts, you adjust, you take another step. And if I am honest, a lot of what I call “certainty” is just a story I learned to tell myself so I can keep walking.

This is why I keep coming back to a short, unsettling little passage from Zhuangzi.

The dream that won’t let you go

Zhuangzi describes a dream:

He dreamed he was a butterfly. Light. Happy. Not thinking about being Zhuangzi at all. Then he woke up and he was Zhuangzi again. And the question is simple enough to repeat, but hard to shake:

Was he Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly… or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi?

It’s the kind of paradox that sounds playful until you sit with it long enough. Then it starts dissolving the assumptions you didn’t realize you were standing on.

Because the point is not “maybe reality is fake” in a science fiction way.

The point is: what makes something real to you while you’re inside it?

What “real” feels like from the inside

Inside a dream, the dream is reality. Not because it is true, but because it is total:

• it has its own logic
• it has its own momentum
• it has its own emotions that feel final

You don’t experience a dream as “a simulation.” You experience it as life.

Then you wake up. And your waking mind does something brutal: it demotes the dream. It calls it “just a dream.” It edits it out of your official reality.

But that demotion is a privilege of hindsight.

While you were dreaming, you didn’t have hindsight. You had presence.

So Zhuangzi’s question isn’t asking you to panic. It’s asking you to notice the fragility of the line you draw between “real” and “not real.”

The paradox of identity: who is the “I” that wakes up?

There’s another layer that always hits me harder: identity.

In the dream, there was an “I” that felt like a butterfly. After waking, there is an “I” that feels like a person.

So which one is the “real” self?

Most days, we answer that with habit:

• the one with your name
• the one with responsibilities
• the one that can show receipts

But Zhuangzi gently points out that the self you call “real” is the one you’re currently inhabiting.

And that should humble you.

Because if identity can feel complete in multiple modes, then the “I” you’re defending so fiercely might be more fluid than you’d like.

The modern version of the dream

We don’t only dream at night.

We live inside waking dreams too:

• the story of who we are
• the story of what success is supposed to look like
• the story that next month will finally be calm
• the story that if we just fix one more thing, we’ll feel whole

Some of these stories are useful. Many are invisible. A few are prisons.

And the strange part is: you can’t tell which story you’re inside until something wakes you up.

Sometimes the wake-up is joyful: a new opportunity, a new love, a new place. Sometimes it’s violent: a loss, a failure, a betrayal, a health scare.

But the effect is similar. You suddenly realize your “reality” had more assumptions than you noticed.

The part I want to carry into the year

I think this is what I like about the Butterfly Dream. It does not try to win an argument. It just makes you softer around the edges. It makes you less eager to declare that you have finally figured things out.

It also makes me pay attention to how certainty shows up in my own life.

Sometimes certainty is wisdom, earned over time. Other times certainty is fear wearing clean clothes.

On January 1st, it is tempting to become the kind of person who knows exactly what the year will be. It is tempting to lock the future into a sentence and call that sentence a plan.

But I have learned that life does not stay inside sentences for long.

So I am trying something different this year.

I want to be more honest about uncertainty, not as a lack, but as a real condition of being alive. I want to leave room for surprise, for contradiction, for learning the hard way, for changing my mind without turning it into a crisis of identity.

If Zhuangzi was right, then part of maturity is learning to live without needing reality to be perfectly pinned down before you can move through it.

A softer conclusion than a “truth”

Zhuangzi doesn’t give you an answer. He gives you a mirror.

And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the goal isn’t to solve the paradox of reality. Maybe the goal is to live well inside it:

• to be less arrogant about what you “know”
• to be less rigid about who you “are”
• to stay curious about the story you’re currently inside

So here’s what I’m carrying into 2026:

Not a demand for perfect certainty.

Just a commitment to wake up more often.