When The Ground Moves

Stability does its best work invisibly. You build a life on top of it without ever questioning whether the thing underneath is actually load-bearing. You go to work, train, make plans for next year and the five years after that. You assume tomorrow will probably look a lot like today because, for most of your life, it has. That isn’t ignorance. It’s simply how human beings are wired. Certainty gives us permission to focus on living instead of surviving. It becomes the floor beneath every decision we make, so familiar that we eventually stop noticing it’s there at all.

Then something shifts. The ground moves beneath your feet and, almost instinctively, you stop looking ahead and start looking down. You want to understand what happened. You want to know whether it will happen again. You start searching for information that might make you feel steady. You read more. You watch more. You listen more. Somewhere along the way your attention becomes consumed by the movement beneath your feet rather than the direction you were walking. The irony is that the more closely you study unstable ground, the less stable you often become.

2026 has served me more opportunities to listen to people than many years before. Or maybe my built in wireless is finally in tune. I get to sit across coffee tables, dinner tables and office desks and listen to what’s occupying people’s minds. Everyone is different but many share similar narratives on 2026 thus far. People have been challenged in new ways. People have been challenged in ways they maybe thought they never would have been. Safety for many has been a hot topic.When physical safety is questioned, even briefly, your nervous system notices before your conscious mind has time to process it. It is real, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

What fascinates me isn’t how people struggle. It is how the direction their energy had travelled. Common conversations point outwards. What was happening? What might happen next? What are people saying? What have you heard? Entire days are being consumed by conversations about things that nobody could predict and nobody could control. The mind is desperately searching for certainty in places where certainty simply doesn’t exist. We have all done it. The problem is that while all of your attention is fixed on the outside world, you quietly lose sight of your own.

That became obvious every time I ask the same two questions I ask in coaching: Who are you? What do you want? Not a single person thinks they are difficult questions, yet almost everyone struggles to answer them cleanly. Not because people don’t have answers, but because they don’t have space to hear them. Our minds are already full. Every bit of capacity had been spent analysing the movement of the ground beneath us. When there is no quiet, there is no clarity. And without clarity, everything starts coming into question. Jobs, relationships, towns, cities, present, past and future. Things that in January felt solid suddenly begin to feel uncertain, not because they have changed, but because the person looking at them has.

There is a common theme. Almost everyone I have the honour of speaking to has a genuinely good life. They love their work. They love their families. They live in homes they are proud of. They have friends, health and opportunity. The foundations of their lives remain present. But have we stopped looking at them. Attention becomes so consumed by what might happen tomorrow that we completely lose sight of everything that remains true today. That is one of the great dangers of uncertainty. It doesn’t always remove what is good. Sometimes it simply blinds us to it.

We live in environments of people carrying the same thing, all doing it quietly. Few ask for help. Everyone assumes they are the only ones struggling, so they soldier on in silence. That silence is what turns difficult periods into something that takes years to work through.

When the external world gets loud, the instinct is to consume more of it, as though enough information will eventually add up to reassurance. It never does. You cannot read your way to stability. The only ground that was ever really yours is the ground inside you, and it is built through space, honesty and attention rather than analysis. Uncertainty doesn’t require a better forecast. It requires a stronger anchor.

I’d be lying if I said the questions this year has raised for us were a bad thing. Many people have been prompted to think about the next chapter of their lives with more honesty than they’ve had in years, and that is a gift, even if it arrived badly wrapped. There may still be some weird feelings that something has genuinely been taken away. Remember though, when the ground moves, you don’t become steadier by watching the ground. You become steadier by knowing who you are and what you want.

No Weakness,
Marcus