When the Next Good Thing Is Hard to See
Some of life’s most difficult experiences look different when we remember them years later. A situation that once occupied nearly every waking thought has become part of our history. Perhaps it ended well. Perhaps it never resolved the way we hoped. Yet life continued, often in directions we could not have imagined while we were living through it.
Looking back, we can sometimes recognize how much we have already endured. There were days when we had little confidence about what would happen next, yet we found a way to continue. New relationships developed, unexpected opportunities appeared, and ordinary pleasures gradually returned. Some difficulties left their mark, but they did not prevent other good things from entering our lives.
There is something reassuring in remembering this, particularly when life becomes uncertain again. It lends weight to the simple encouragement that good things may still be coming, even when we cannot see any evidence of them. Our own experience reminds us that the future has surprised us before.
Still, it can be remarkably difficult to recover that perspective when we are in the middle of another difficult season. The uncertainty in front of us seems more immediate than anything we have learned from the past. We find ourselves looking ahead, searching for some assurance that things will work out, while struggling to give our attention to the life unfolding around us.
Part of the explanation lies in how our minds anticipate the future, and how anticipation changes our experience of time.
Waiting has a way of changing how we experience time. An afternoon can seem unusually long when we’re expecting an important answer. A decision that once appeared only days away can begin to feel increasingly distant. The clock continues to measure the hours as it always has, yet our experience of those hours changes.
There is a reason for this, and it has something to do with the remarkable way the human mind anticipates the future.
Our brains have developed an extraordinary capacity to recognize patterns and use them to predict what may happen next. Long before human beings could explain this ability, it helped living creatures navigate their surroundings. Anticipating when food might become available, or recognizing the signs of approaching danger, allowed an organism to prepare before events unfolded. The ability to look ahead offered practical advantages in a world where survival often depended on responding at the right moment.
Neuroscientists Giovanni Pezzulo, Thomas Parr, and Karl Friston have explored how increasingly sophisticated predictive abilities may have emerged from simpler biological processes that helped organisms regulate themselves and respond to changing environments. Their work suggests that our capacity for planning and imagination builds upon a much older evolutionary history of anticipating and adapting to what comes next. [1]
This capacity remains deeply embedded in how we experience everyday life. We anticipate the consequences of decisions, interpret changes in other people’s behavior, and plan our activities around events that have yet to occur. Much of this happens with little conscious effort. Our minds are continually drawing on past experience to make sense of what might come next.
Uncertainty complicates that process.
When an expected event remains unresolved, the mind has difficulty settling on what will happen or when. An unanswered message might mean someone is busy, or it might signal something more consequential. Without additional information, we cannot easily determine which explanation is correct. Our attention returns to the question, looking for some indication that the situation has changed.
Researchers studying time perception have found that this kind of anticipation can affect how long an interval feels. In a series of four experiments published in 2016, psychologists Sam Maglio and Cherrie Kwok found that uncertainty about an event awaiting someone at the end of a journey made the journey itself seem longer. The destination was unchanged, as was the time required to reach it. What changed was the person’s expectation of what lay ahead. [2]
Other research helps explain why this happens. Our sense of duration depends partly on where we direct our attention. A 2010 analysis of 117 experiments by Richard Block, Peter Hancock, and Dan Zakay found that the mental demands placed upon our attention can significantly influence judgments of elapsed time. When we’re absorbed in an activity, we may pay relatively little attention to time passing. When our attention repeatedly returns to the passage of time itself, we become more conscious of its duration. The anticipation of an unresolved event can keep drawing us back to that awareness. [3]
The same ability that helps us prepare for the future can make the present more difficult to inhabit when the future refuses to reveal itself.
Centuries before the development of modern psychology, St. Augustine explored a related mystery in his Confessions. He was trying to understand what time actually is, and how human beings can experience a past that no longer exists or a future that has not yet arrived.
Augustine recognized that both have a presence in the mind. We experience the past through memory and the future through expectation. The present is where our attention moves between them. In Book XI, Chapter 28, he observed that what we call a long future is, in our experience, a long expectation of the future. [4]
His observation offers an interesting way to understand waiting. The event we’re anticipating has not happened, yet it can already occupy a considerable part of our present life. We can spend an afternoon mentally inhabiting a conversation that may never occur, or worrying about a decision whose outcome remains entirely unknown.
And because the future is uncertain, our expectations can lead us in very different directions.
We may imagine a favorable outcome and feel encouraged by the possibility. We may recall a previous disappointment and anticipate another. The mind draws on experience in either case, yet neither expectation necessarily tells us much about what will actually happen.
This is where the psychology of hope becomes particularly interesting.
Psychologist C. R. Snyder spent much of his career studying hope as a way of thinking about goals and possibilities. In his 2002 paper, Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind, he described hope through two related capacities: recognizing possible paths toward meaningful goals and finding the motivation to pursue them. Hope, in this understanding, influences how we engage with circumstances that have not yet been resolved. [5]
Subsequent research has explored the relationship between hope and psychological well-being. A 2023 meta-analysis by Jordan Corrigan and Nicola Schutte found that both the motivation to pursue goals and the ability to identify pathways toward them were associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety. These findings do not establish that hope alone produces those benefits, nor do they suggest that hope guarantees a favorable outcome. They do indicate that the possibilities we perceive are meaningfully related to our psychological well-being. [6]
Perhaps this helps explain why remembering what we have already lived through can be so valuable. Experience gives us something to draw upon when the future feels difficult to imagine. We remember that uncertainty has visited us before, that circumstances have changed, and that our lives have contained possibilities we could not recognize at the time.
Still, there are circumstances in which even the most resourceful person cannot see a way forward. Some decisions belong to other people. Relationships can be damaged despite sincere efforts to repair them. There are experiences in life that do not yield to determination or careful planning.
Past resilience can give us confidence in our ability to endure difficulty, but it cannot promise that every difficulty will end as we wish.
St. Benedict offers something worth considering here.
In Chapter 4 of his Rule, Benedict describes what he calls the tools for good works. The chapter addresses the ordinary difficulties of human relationships, including anger, jealousy, and the challenge of making peace after a disagreement. His instructions recognize how easily people can fall short of the lives they intend to lead.
After this long collection of practical guidance, he closes with a final instruction:
“And never to despair of God’s mercy.” [7]
Its placement is significant. Benedict has acknowledged the many ways people struggle to live well, yet he ends by insisting that failure need not have the final word.
His instruction carries an understanding of human life shaped by the Christian belief that God’s mercy remains available even after we have fallen short. There is always the possibility of turning toward that mercy, of seeking forgiveness, and of beginning again.
For Benedict, hope is grounded in something more enduring than our ability to anticipate a favorable outcome. God’s mercy does not depend upon circumstances unfolding according to our expectations.
This adds a dimension to the familiar encouragement that good things are still coming.
There is genuine value in believing that life may hold possibilities we cannot presently imagine. Experience gives us reason to remain open to them. Yet some hopes will remain unfulfilled, and some difficulties will leave lasting consequences. A future worth living cannot depend entirely upon receiving the answers we want.
Benedict’s confidence rests on the conviction that even when our circumstances disappoint us, the possibility of responding faithfully to life remains. Mercy allows for renewal when our own efforts have failed. It invites us to continue when we cannot see where continuing will lead.
Perhaps this helps explain the importance Benedict placed on the ordinary rhythm of daily life. Those who followed his Rule returned each day to familiar work and prayer. Their responsibilities continued through seasons of uncertainty, disappointment, and personal failure. Benedict gave them a way to remain faithful to the life before them without requiring that they first resolve everything troubling their minds.
There is wisdom in that practice even beyond the monastery.
Consider an ordinary afternoon when an important decision remains unresolved. Perhaps we have sent a message, made a request, or had a difficult conversation, and now the outcome belongs to someone else. We’ve done what we reasonably can. Still, we find ourselves checking for a response, thinking through what we might have said differently, or imagining what the answer could mean.
At some point, it may help to recognize that another hour of worrying will not bring the answer any closer. We can acknowledge that the uncertainty remains and decide to check again later. In the meantime, there is work that deserves our attention, someone who has been waiting for a conversation, or a commitment we made long before this particular concern entered our lives.
Even something as ordinary as putting the phone away during dinner can become a meaningful choice. The person sitting across from us has a claim on our attention that an imagined future does not. The conversation may be unremarkable, but it is happening now. We can listen without continually returning to the question that remains unanswered.
And sometimes the most important thing we can do is begin again in a more personal sense. Perhaps the strain of uncertainty has made us impatient with someone. We spoke sharply or neglected a responsibility because our thoughts were elsewhere. Benedict’s instruction about mercy becomes quite practical in such a moment. We can acknowledge what happened, ask forgiveness, and make an effort to repair it. There is no need to wait for the larger problem to resolve before attending to the smaller harm we’ve caused.
None of this removes the uncertainty. We may still wake up tomorrow without the answer we’re hoping for. But the ordinary things we do while waiting shape the life we’re living in the meantime.
I find something particularly encouraging in the idea that hope can be renewed through such small beginnings. There will be times when our expectations have disappointed us and our confidence in the future has diminished. Remembering what we have already endured may help us recover some perspective. Benedict’s instruction reminds us that even after failure or disappointment, mercy remains available, and there is still something worthwhile we can do with the day before us.
Waiting will probably never become entirely comfortable. The mind will continue anticipating, imagining, and searching for answers. It is part of how we make our way through an uncertain world. We cannot simply decide to stop caring about outcomes that matter deeply to us.
We can, however, notice when our attention has become so occupied with what might happen that we’re overlooking what is happening. And when we notice, we can return to the work, the conversation, or the person in front of us. We may need to make that return many times.
There may be good things still to come. We cannot always know what they will be, or when they will arrive. Some may look very different from what we once hoped for.
Perhaps one of those good things is already within reach, in a responsibility we can fulfill, a relationship we can care for, or a beginning we can make today.
References
- Pezzulo, G., Parr, T., & Friston, K. (2022). “The evolution of brain architectures for predictive coding and active inference.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377, 20200531. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0531
- Maglio, S. J., & Kwok, C. Y. N. (2016). “Anticipated ambiguity prolongs the present: Evidence of a return trip effect.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(11), 1415–1419. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000228
- Block, R. A., Hancock, P. A., & Zakay, D. (2010). “How cognitive load affects duration judgments: A meta-analytic review.” Acta Psychologica, 134(3), 330–343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.03.006
- Augustine of Hippo. Confessions, Book XI, Chapter 28, sections 37–38. Translation by Albert C. Outler. Read the text at Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
- Snyder, C. R. (2002). “Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind.” Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1304_01
- Corrigan, J. A., & Schutte, N. S. (2023). “The relationships between the hope dimensions of agency thinking and pathways thinking with depression and anxiety: A meta-analysis.” International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 8, 211–255. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-023-00099-1
- Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 4, verse 72, “The Instruments of Good Works.” English text published by the Order of Saint Benedict. Read Chapter 4.
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