The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 7 by Goh Ling Yong
The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 7
Finding Home in the Great Unknown
The first crack in my world wasn’t a thunderclap; it was the quiet sound of a teacup being set down on a saucer, a fraction too hard. I was twenty-one, sitting across from my grandfather in the dim light of his study. The air smelled of old paper and dried jasmine flowers. He had just finished telling me a story about his youth, a story that didn't align with the grand, unwavering narrative I had been taught, the one I had built my life upon. In his version, there was less heroism and more happenstance, less destiny and more desperation.
He looked at me, his eyes clouded with memory, and in that small, almost imperceptible dissonance, a hairline fracture appeared in the foundation of my belief.
For most of my life, I lived in a house of certainty. The walls were made of shoulds, the roof tiled with supposed-tos. The floor plan was simple, linear, and promised safety. I believed in causality, in a universe that rewarded diligence with success and goodness with peace. It was a tidy, comforting architecture. My map was meticulously drawn by the hands of my parents, my teachers, my culture. Each road was paved, each destination marked with a neat, calligraphed label: University. Career. Marriage. Home.
I followed the map. I walked the roads. For a long time, the quiet hum of progress was enough.
The erosion began subtly, like a tide pulling sand from a shore you don’t realize is shrinking until one day you look up and the waves are lapping at your door. It was the promotion I worked for that went to someone else. It was a relationship that ended not with a dramatic betrayal, but with the slow, agonizing fizzle of two people becoming strangers. It was the gnawing feeling that the destinations on my map, once gleaming like promised cities, looked a lot like empty parking lots when I finally arrived.
Each event was a wave, pulling another handful of my sandy certainty out to sea. I tried to shore up the foundations. I read books on philosophy and mindfulness, trying to patch the cracks with intellectual cement. I worked harder, loved more fiercely, clung to the edges of my dissolving map with white-knuckled desperation. But you cannot reason with the tide.
I remember standing on an MRT platform during peak hour, the train screaming into the station, a river of tired faces flowing around me. I was a rock in that river, unmoving. A profound sense of dislocation washed over me. I looked at my own hands, the lines on my palms, and felt no connection to them. The life I was living felt like a suit of clothes I had put on, one that was now a size too small, constricting my breath. Who is this person? I wondered. And what of Goh Ling Yong, the boy who once knew all the answers, who believed his life was a story already written, with a clear beginning, middle, and a triumphant end? He was nowhere to be found. In his place was a ghost, haunting the edges of a life that no longer felt like his own.
That was the true terror of it: not the loss of the path, but the loss of the self who was walking it. Without the map, who was the traveler?
My climax wasn't a single, explosive event. It was a slow, quiet surrender. It happened on a trip to the coast, a desperate attempt to outrun the emptiness that had become my constant companion. I was walking along a deserted beach at dusk. The sky was a bruised purple, the sea a sheet of hammered steel. The wind was relentless, whipping my hair across my face and stealing the warmth from my skin.
I had come here looking for an answer, a sign, some grand cosmic confirmation that I was not irrevocably lost. I found only the raw, indifferent power of the natural world. The waves crashed and receded, their rhythm a constant cycle of creation and destruction. They didn’t care about my map, my career, or my broken heart. They just were.
I sank to my knees in the cold, damp sand. The last of my carefully constructed walls crumbled. There was no grand plan. There was no guaranteed outcome. There was just this: the taste of salt on my lips, the roar of the ocean in my ears, the vast, terrifying, and beautiful emptiness of it all.
I wept. Not from sadness, but from a profound and aching relief. It was the excruciating release of a pressure I hadn't known I was carrying my entire life—the pressure to know, to be certain, to be in control. In letting it go, I wasn't falling into a void; I was being caught by something far larger.
As the last light bled from the sky, the first stars began to appear. Pinpricks of ancient light in the deepening velvet. They were not a map. A map is a human invention, an imposition of order onto chaos. The stars were different. They were points of reference in an infinite expanse. They offered guidance, not prescription. You could use them to find your bearing, but you had to choose the direction yourself.
In that moment, a new understanding settled in my bones. Belief isn’t a fortress to be defended. It’s a vessel to be built. My old house of certainty had been destroyed by the tide, yes, but I was left standing on the shore with the raw materials of its wreckage. I could use them to build something new. Not another fortress with rigid walls, but a boat. Something flexible, resilient, designed not to withstand the ocean, but to navigate it.
My transformation wasn’t about finding a new, better map. It was about learning to be a navigator. It was about trading the illusion of certainty for the power of curiosity. It was about learning to read the stars, to feel the direction of the wind, to listen to the currents of my own heart.
I no longer seek solid ground. I have learned that the ground is always shifting, that the shore is always being reshaped by the tide. Home is not a fixed point on a map. It is not a destination to be reached.
Home is the quiet courage to face the vastness of the sea and say, I don’t know where I’m going, and that’s okay. Home is the feeling of the tiller in my hand, the recognition that I have the strength and the wisdom to steer through whatever comes. It is the peace that comes from embracing the great, beautiful, terrifying unknown, not as an enemy to be conquered, but as the very canvas upon which a life is painted.
Sometimes, the old fear still whispers to me on nights when the fog rolls in and I can’t see the stars. The ghost of the boy with the perfect map reminds me of the comfort I have lost. But then I remember the feeling of the cold sand beneath my knees, the liberating sting of salty air, and the quiet awe of a universe that offers no guarantees, only possibilities.
The tide comes in, and for the first time, I don’t brace for the erosion. I feel the cool water wash over my feet, and I know I am home.
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