A Meditation on Security

how to find stable ground in unstable times

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April 1, 2026 / Full Moon • Pink Moon

Today I want to share with you something from my book, Work That Matters. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this short essay that’s included in the book. When I wrote it ten years ago, the reference point was the fear that can come up when we contemplate making a big change in our career (and any other part of our life).

While that’s certainly still a thing, I’m struck by how our shared reference point has expanded exponentially in the past decade to now include a world teetering on the edge of climate catastrophe, economic collapse, and nuclear war. These things are no longer theoretical possibilities, they are knocking at our door.

If we, like most humans, have a strong need for certainty and security, we are being stretched to and beyond the limit these days. In our very uncertain world, I thought this might be a helpful short read.

The way Work That Matters is structured, there is a chapter for each of the “6 Keys to Liberation-based Livelihood,” and each chapter is capped off with a story from my own life that illustrates that Key. This is the one that accompanies “Make Friends With Uncertainty,” Key #4.

A couple of pieces of background that are helpful as you read it —

• The two people quoted, Jami Sieber and Katya Lesher, were profiled earlier in the book as examples of what it means to create work that has meaning and joy.

• In the last paragraph, I refer to “Core Intention.” This is one of the main concepts of the book. In contrast to “passion,” your Core Intention doesn’t have to be connected to an object or an activity — instead, it’s the essential reason that you’re inspired to do those things. You might recognize that you love to cook. But when you start to dig for your Core Intention, you discover that the driving force underneath that passion is actually that you love to nourish people. And that desire to offer nourishment can take many forms — cooking is simply one of them.

Even though the book and this essay are about work and livelihood, I believe the principles in them can apply to every area of our life. I hope there may be something in this short piece to support you, wherever you’re at right now.

A Meditation on Security

One autumn, I went for a hike at one of my favorite places on the planet, Ghost Ranch, in Abiquiú, New Mexico. This is the land that Georgia O’Keeffe fell madly in love with, where she spent many years capturing the majesty and mystery of the earth and sky in her paintings.

I chose the Box Canyon Trail, one I hadn’t been on for a few years. Since my last visit, tremendous summer monsoons and a magnitude of rain caused flooding in the area. As I made my way through the twists and turns of the trail, I felt disoriented. Nothing was where I remembered it. Could this possibly be the same path I had been on before? My feet had memorized a way through the canyon, but it wasn’t this one! I looked for familiar forks in the trail and landmarks, but everything was different.

When I arrived at the stream that flows through the center of the canyon, I saw uprooted trees everywhere. Some of these trees were lodged in places that had been the original trail, now blocked and entirely rerouted. The roots of these upside-down trees had caught all kinds of natural debris: rocks, feathers, leaves, sand.

I sat down on a boulder, noticing how unsettled I felt. There between the high canyon walls, I looked up and near the very top of the northern wall I saw a rock column that I remembered from before, standing like a sentry over this disarray. I realized how much I count on something as seemingly solid as the earth to be unchanging. Yet here I was, in a landscape of upheaval.

Everything and anything can change, in any moment. We know this intellectually but it’s a different story when our body experiences it. Those who have experienced serious illness and who have been touched by death know this truth intimately. When I asked Jami Sieber what helped her deal with the uncertainty of her path as a musician, especially earlier in her career, she told me,

I was very sick when I was fourteen and almost died. I experienced a great deal of fear, and yet I survived. That became the basis of how I lived after that. There was something about facing death and giving in to that possibility that my illness would limit my ability to speak or do other things. It became my teacher, and the basis of how I find courage in my life. It took me years to recognize that gift. I really see it now. That’s my guide, and that also led me to healing work. I saw what human touch and human presence can do, the presence of heart.

Katya Lesher had a similar story:

Having been diagnosed with cancer myself, and having been around death and dying and illness, I know that anybody’s life can change in an instant.

I feel like we’ve been convinced that if we do certain things in a certain way, we’ll be secure, and it’s not true. People lose their jobs every single day, or have an accident or illness that prevents them from doing their jobs. None of it is certain. Just recognizing this is freeing to me. We have an out breath, and that may be our last out breath. But then we have another one, and it’s like “Yay, what can I do in this moment?” That’s what we have, each moment.

We have this idea that we can count on things happening in a certain way if we do certain things. We think if we are a reliable, hard worker, we will be rewarded. The idea of “Security” traps and deadens us more than we realize. I don’t mean to flippantly dismiss your concerns but I do want you to realize that you may have less security than you think with your current job—or anything. The truth is that everything is impermanent. There is no guarantee that something won’t happen that results in big changes in your current work situation, and this is out of your control (despite the illusion of control that we often hang onto).

Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of One Billion Rising, brings this point home in a powerful way:

In fact, security is essentially elusive, impossible. We all die. We all get sick. We all get old. People leave us. People surprise us. People change us. Nothing is secure. And this is the good news. But only if you are not seeking security as the point of your life.… I am proposing that we reconceive the dream. That we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. That we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.¹

When your life is guided by your Core Intention rather than a need for things to be certain or by other people’s expectations, the rewards are great. All that’s required is the courage to let go of the myth of security, and the openness to venture into “unanswered wonder” as Jami beautifully describes it.

Some questions for contemplation…

• What do you understand as your Core Intention for your life?

• How does your relationship to uncertainty and instability change when you anchor yourself into your Core Intention?

• “The myth of security” may be possibly a little easier to puncture when it’s confined to a limited aspect of our life, such as a job change. How do you see that concept being relevant (if you do) now as we face multiple crises on the world stage?

Going through a career transition and want to do it in a mindful way? Check out my book Work That Matters: Create a Livelihood that Reflects Your Core Intention

1. From Insecure at Last, by Eve Ensler (2006, Random House)