There is a particular kind of waiting that has no clear ending. Not the waiting for a phone call, or a test result, or a season to turn. The waiting I mean is quieter than that, and it lives underneath almost everything else — the sense that something is coming, we don’t know quite what, and there is nothing left to do but stand in the garden and notice the air.

I came across these words recently, in an essay by the Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee called “Fire Season.” He writes from his home in California, describing the particular ache of a beautiful spring arriving without rain — the blossoms, the fawns on shaky legs, the wisteria falling lavender over the garden — all of it lovely, and all of it shadowed by the knowing that the dry hills are simply waiting to burn. “Even amidst all this beauty,” he writes, “this awakening which each year is so very new, we are waiting for the fires.”

I don’t think this feeling belongs only to people who live near wildfire country. I think most of us know this particular waiting intimately, even if the thing we’re waiting for has nothing to do with smoke on the horizon.

Many of us are living in our own fire season. A diagnosis we’re watching rather than holding yet. A spouse whose memory is changing in ways we notice before anyone says the word out loud. A body that still works, mostly, but no longer the way it once did. A world that feels less steady than it did when we were young, in ways that are hard to name and harder to ignore. The fire hasn’t come. But we can smell something in the air, and some quiet part of us has already started packing a bag, just in case.

There is no use pretending this isn’t real. The not-knowing is real. The wariness underneath the beautiful days is real.

But Vaughan-Lee writes something else, too, something I haven’t been able to set down since I read it: “There are stories that destroy us, and stories that sustain us.”

I have sat with people for many years now who are living through their own uncertain seasons, and I have come to believe this is one of the truest things I know. It is not that the hard thing isn’t hard. It is that we are always, whether we realize it or not, choosing which story we are living inside of while it happens.

One story says: I do not know what is coming, and so I must brace, monitor, and control every variable I can reach. This story makes sense. It comes from love, from wanting to protect what matters. But it also tends to steal the very days it’s trying to protect, because it cannot rest in the present long enough to actually live there.

The other story is older, and quieter, and it says something closer to this: I do not know what is coming. And I belong to something larger than my own ability to predict it.

Vaughan-Lee writes about the trees outside his window — ancient ones, with root systems that, as the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has shown, reach toward each other underground through a vast web of fungi, sharing water and nutrients and warning signals across the whole forest. The old trees, the “Mother Trees,” nourish the younger, smaller ones through this hidden network. No tree stands as a fortress unto itself. None of them are facing the fire alone.

I think this is true of us, too, in ways our culture rarely teaches us to notice. We are not meant to carry our fire seasons by ourselves, white-knuckled and bracing. We belong to networks of our own — the people who love us, the faith that has carried generations before us, the simple, ancient knowing that has sustained human beings through every uncertain season since the very first one. That network is still here, even now. Even on the days the smoke seems thickest.

I don’t know what your particular fire season holds, or when — or whether — the thing you’re bracing for will come. None of us are given that knowledge in advance, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But I do know that the bracing itself, the white-knuckled vigilance, is not the same thing as readiness. And I know that the beauty arriving right now, today, in your own garden or kitchen window or the hand resting in yours, is not made smaller by the uncertainty surrounding it. If anything, it asks more of us to notice it while it’s here.

The fires Vaughan-Lee writes about may come, or they may not, this year. The hills stay dry either way. But underneath the dry hills, the roots are still reaching toward each other in the dark, doing the quiet work of holding the whole forest together. That work doesn’t stop, whether or not the fire ever comes.

We can choose, even now, even amid the not-knowing, which story we are living inside of. Not because it changes what’s coming. But because it changes whether we are present for what’s here.