There is a particular quality to early March mornings in Querétaro. The air still carries the cool of the night before, and the light falls across the cantera stone in a way that feels unhurried, almost deliberate. The jacarandas are beginning — not fully opened yet, just the first clusters of violet appearing along the branches, a kind of announcement rather than an arrival. I find myself stopping to look at them more than I need to, and I have been thinking about why.
Part of it is simply beauty. But another part is the way those trees seem to hold their ground. They are not blooming in response to any political weather, any news cycle, any collective uncertainty. They are responding to their own internal timing, their own deep knowledge of when. Something in that steadiness feels instructive right now.
The world outside has not been steady. Reports from nearly every direction describe turbulence: fragmentation, confrontation, the sense that institutions and structures once taken for granted are under pressure in ways that feel genuinely new. I am not going to rehearse those pressures here, and I am not going to offer political analysis. What interests me, as a psychologist and someone attentive to inner orientation, is what happens inside a person when the external world grows this uncertain. That is the question I want to sit with today.
The Compensation That Arrives
Carl Jung wrote about a principle he called enantiodromia, the tendency of any force, pushed to its extreme, to reverse into its opposite. He borrowed the term from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who believed that all things carry the seed of their own undoing, and that this reversal is not a catastrophe but a natural law. Jung applied the idea to individuals, but it has always struck me as equally true at the collective level. When a culture overinvests in certainty, rigidity, and external control, when the outer world is pressed to perform a kind of stability it cannot genuinely sustain, the compensation tends to arrive in the form of exactly the turbulence it was trying to prevent. What is suppressed seeks expression. What is denied returns.
This is not to say that turbulence is comfortable, or that we should greet it with indifference. The Jungian observation is not reassurance. It is an invitation to understand what the disruption is calling for. Underneath the noise, it tends to call for an inward turning. Not withdrawal, not escape, not the kind of numbing that passes for peace. A genuine orientation toward something more essential in oneself.
James Hollis, the Jungian analyst whose work I return to often, speaks of what he calls the “larger life” — the life that is asking to be lived beneath the one we are performing for the world. He argues that much of our suffering comes not from life being too hard, but from our own reluctance to encounter the depth that is available to us.
The outer chaos that unsettles us, he suggests, is sometimes the very pressure that cracks open a door we would not have opened otherwise. The question is not whether the disruption will arrive, but whether we meet it with contraction or with curiosity.
Inner Orientation: Two Responses to Uncertainty
In my coaching work and in my own experience, when the external world becomes uncertain, people tend to respond in one of two ways. The first is contraction: reaching for whatever offers a sense of solid ground, familiar identities, simplified narratives, the comfort of knowing clearly who is right and who is wrong. There is something deeply human in this response. The nervous system is designed to seek safety, and when safety feels absent, it will reach for the nearest approximation. But the approximations available in a turbulent time are often brittle. They hold for a while, and then they do not.
The second response is harder, and rarer, and more sustaining. It is the decision, and it is always a decision, however small, to turn toward oneself rather than away. To ask not only what is happening out there, but what is being asked of me here, in this life I am actually living. Joseph Campbell would have recognized this as the threshold moment: the point at which the hero cannot return to the old world, and the new world has not yet made itself clear. The in-between, as Campbell understood it, is not merely an obstacle. It is the transformative space itself.
The View from Querétaro
Living in México has given me a particular vantage point on this. I am close enough to the United States to feel the weight of its current season, and far enough to observe it with some perspective. What I notice, sitting here in the centro of Querétaro, watching the jacarandas come in, is that the inner life does not wait for the outer world to cooperate. The work of becoming, the slow and honest work of understanding who you are and what you are here to do, does not pause for political conditions. If anything, it becomes more urgent when the outer structures stop providing the orientation we had been borrowing from them.
This is, at its core, what A Life Aligned is about. Not alignment in the sense of having everything arranged and settled, but alignment in the deeper sense: the ongoing practice of listening to what is most true in you, and orienting your choices accordingly. That kind of alignment is available even when, perhaps especially when, the world is not cooperating. It is not a destination. It is a posture. A way of standing.
An Anchor in the Noise
One of the practices I return to in periods of collective uncertainty is what I think of as an anchor question. It is simple, and it takes no more than a few quiet minutes. The question is this: what, in my life right now, reflects what I actually believe? Not what I am supposed to believe, not what would be convenient, but what I know to be true about how a human being should live. The answers are rarely dramatic. They tend to be ordinary things — the quality of attention I bring to the people near me, the way I move through my work, the presence I offer when someone is struggling. These are the things that do not change with the news cycle. These are the things that hold.
El mundo sigue girando. The world keeps turning. And within that turning, each of us carries something that is not at the mercy of its speed. The jacarandas are teaching me that again this week. Not because they are indifferent to the world, but because they are so fully themselves within it.
A question to sit with:
When you strip away what is uncertain and unresolved right now, in the world, in your circumstances, in the season you are in, what remains that is genuinely yours? What do you know about yourself, about how you want to live, that does not depend on the outer weather to be true?
If this piece resonated, the exploration continues in A Life Aligned, and you are always welcome to share your thoughts in the comments below or connect through the community.
With care,
Mark
Writing from home in Querétaro