The Groundlessness Of Being
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
There is a moment—
rare, but honest—
when the illusion fails.
Not all at once.
Not catastrophically.
Just a quiet slipping.
The floor does not disappear—
it simply stops promising
that it will hold.
Time is responsible for this.
It moves without witness,
without reverence,
without ever once
asking you
if you are ready.
You wake inside it—
mid-sentence, mid-life—
surrounded by things
that were supposed to last.
Nothing announces its leaving.
It just… continues.
And beneath that continuation,
a recognition begins to hum:
There is nowhere
permanent
to stand.
This is the groundlessness.
Not disorder—
but the absence
of anything that will stay.
Everything you love
is already loosening.
Every certainty
has an expiration
it does not disclose.
The body understands
before the mind agrees.
It braces.
It scans.
It rehearses loss
like a language
it never wanted to learn
but speaks fluently anyway.
Anxiety is not confusion.
It is accuracy
without relief.
So we construct.
We build days
that stack neatly
on top of one another.
We measure.
We improve.
We refine ourselves
into something
that looks stable
from a distance.
We call it discipline.
But beneath it—
a quieter motive:
If I keep moving,
I will not have to feel
what is moving beneath me.
Work becomes structure.
Achievement becomes evidence.
Productivity becomes
a kind of prayer—
not for success,
but for solidity.
Because stillness
is dangerous.
Stillness is where you notice
that nothing
is holding you.
No one taught us
how to stay there.
No one said—
this feeling is not a problem.
This trembling recognition
is not something
to outpace.
So we learned to override it.
To soothe it with progress.
To silence it with goals.
To outrun it
with becoming.
But it does not disappear.
It waits—
patient as gravity.
Until the strategies thin.
Until the noise fails.
Until you find yourself
standing in a life
that no longer distracts you
from itself.
And there it is again—
unchanged.
unresolved.
unavoidable.
The groundlessness.
Only now,
there is nowhere left to go
but into it.
This is the turning.
Not mastery—
but surrender.
To stop negotiating
with impermanence.
To feel the instability
fully,
without immediately
trying to repair it.
To let the uncertainty
move through you
without naming it
as danger.
It will not comfort you.
It will not resolve.
But if you stay—
long enough
to stop resisting—
something unexpected happens.
Not certainty.
Something quieter.
A steadiness
that does not come
from the world becoming stable,
but from no longer asking it to.
You begin to recognise yourself
without scaffolding.
A presence
that does not depend
on permanence.
A way of standing
inside movement.
And slowly—
without announcement,
without achievement—
you learn
how to remain
even here.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
There are moments—often brief, often unsettling—when we become aware of just how little in life is fixed or guaranteed. Time moves, things change, and the sense of stability we rely on begins to feel more like an agreement than a truth. In response, many of us learn to stay busy, to achieve, to keep moving so we don’t have to sit with that underlying uncertainty. This piece explores that tension—the instinct to avoid the discomfort of not having solid ground, and the quiet, necessary shift toward allowing it, trusting that something steadier can emerge not from control, but from surrender. 💚