How long can you stand not knowing?

Open Water is a collection of essays about uncertainty in ordinary life: waiting for an answer, losing a role, and guessing at what the person across the table is thinking. Each essay ends with questions to sit with and one small thing to try.

The ideas come from two books. The Upside of Uncertainty (2022) is by Nathan Furr, a professor of innovation, and Susannah Harmon Furr, an entrepreneur and designer. They are married, they draw on interviews and on their own life, and they say plainly that they are not psychologists. Surfing Uncertainty (2016) is by the philosopher Andy Clark, and sets out the theory that the brain works by prediction.

Clark’s book is about brains and minds. It says almost nothing about love, quarrels or reassurance, and he presents the theory as promising and unfinished. Where an essay carries his ideas into a marriage or a family, that step is the essay’s own, and the essay says so.

The letters and stories that open each essay are composites. Names and details are invented. The essays do not replace counselling. The Furrs make a point worth repeating here: too much uncertainty is harmful, and some people have far less room to choose than others.