When Force Becomes Information

Most discussions that I have with people about possibility begin with the mind as the primary focus. People ask me whether we have the right mindset, whether we believe in ourselves, or whether we are thinking positively enough to recognize opportunities when they appear. This perspective assumes that possibility is primarily a cognitive phenomenon, one that depends on how we interpret the world around us.

I have come to suspect that possibility actually begins much earlier than conscious thought.

Long before humans developed language, philosophy, or the capacity for abstract reasoning, our ancestors possessed nervous systems that were solving a far more immediate problem. Every moment of every day, they needed to determine where they were, what was changing around them, whether something represented food or danger, and how quickly they needed to respond. An animal that consistently failed to answer those questions rarely survived long enough to pass on its genes.

The nervous system did not evolve to help us think about the world. It evolved to help us remain in continuous relationship with it. Because that’s how we stayed alive, and could live to reproduce and continue our species.

From an evolutionary perspective, perception has always been inseparable from survival. The ability to detect movement in the underbrush, anticipate the trajectory of a falling branch, recognize the approach of a predator, or notice subtle changes in the behavior of other members of the group provided an enormous selective advantage. Every successful prediction reduced uncertainty about what might happen next, allowing an organism to orient itself more effectively within an ever-changing environment.

This evolutionary history helps explain why our nervous systems are so deeply invested in prediction. Prediction is often described as a feature of cognition, but its origins are much older than our capacity for conscious reasoning. Organisms that could anticipate changes in their environment generally fared better than those that simply reacted after the fact. Over millions of years, nervous systems became increasingly sophisticated at using previous experience to generate expectations about what was likely to happen next.

We do not predict because we consciously think ourselves into safety. We predict because prediction has always been one of the nervous system’s most effective strategies for staying alive.

Most of the time, this works remarkably well. Our predictions allow us to catch a ball, navigate familiar streets, understand speech despite background noise, and coordinate complex movements with extraordinary efficiency. They reduce the computational burden of processing every sensory input as though it were entirely novel. The world becomes more manageable because much of it is anticipated before it unfolds.

The difficulty arises when prediction begins to replace perception.

Under conditions of chronic stress or perceived threat, nervous systems often become increasingly committed to their existing models of reality. Attention narrows. Expectations harden. Ambiguity becomes uncomfortable. Rather than remaining open to new information, we begin searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe is about to happen. The physiological processes that evolved to protect us can gradually reduce our willingness to revise our expectations, even when the environment has changed.

This is where I believe possibility enters the conversation.

Perhaps possibility is not simply the existence of multiple potential futures. Perhaps it depends upon whether our nervous system remains capable of perceiving those futures before defensive physiology narrows the field.

Learning to Stay Open

Several years ago (it was actually damn near two decades if I am honest, but who’s counting), I read The Art of Learning by Joshua Waitzkin. Although the book chronicles his experiences in both competitive chess and Tai Chi Chuan, it is not really a book about either discipline. It is a book about learning itself, about what happens when we stop treating performance as the acquisition of techniques and begin understanding it as the cultivation of perception.

That inspiration stayed with me long after I finished the book.

Before reading Waitzkin’s work, I had thought of Tai Chi primarily as a graceful martial art known for its slow, deliberate movements. Like many people, I appreciated its health benefits but had not fully appreciated what it was actually training. Over time, and particularly as I continued my own practice, I began to realize that many of the most important lessons had very little to do with memorizing forms or executing movements correctly. They had everything to do with how the nervous system responds when the world refuses to behave as expected.

One practice in particular continued to capture my attention: push hands.

To an outside observer, push hands can appear deceptively simple. Two practitioners remain in continuous contact while each person applies subtle pressure, changes direction, shifts weight, and searches for opportunities to disrupt the other’s balance. There is no choreography. No predetermined sequence. Each movement emerges from the one that came before it.

What makes the exercise so compelling is not the mechanics of the movements themselves, but the demands they place upon perception.

As long as everything unfolds exactly as anticipated, movement requires relatively little adaptation. The nervous system is simply executing an established model. Push hands rarely allows that luxury. Balance changes unexpectedly. Pressure appears from unfamiliar angles. A partner responds differently than anticipated. The prediction that seemed perfectly reasonable a fraction of a second earlier suddenly becomes obsolete.

The question is no longer whether the movement was technically correct.

The question becomes whether the practitioner can continue perceiving.

Can attention remain broad enough to detect subtle changes in pressure instead of immediately resisting them? Can balance be recovered without stiffening? Can the body remain responsive while previous predictions are being revised in real time?

Those questions extend far beyond martial arts.

The more I reflected on the practice, the less I believed that push hands was teaching people how to win a physical exchange. It seemed to be cultivating something much more fundamental. It was repeatedly placing the nervous system into situations where its existing predictions became insufficient, while simultaneously asking it to remain engaged with an environment that was still unfolding.

Over time, I realized that this principle had quietly become one of the lenses through which I understood many aspects of life. Scientific discovery, meaningful conversation, healthy relationships, parenting, clinical practice, and even our relationship with ourselves all require us to encounter moments when our expectations no longer match reality. In those moments, we can become increasingly committed to defending our original prediction, or we can remain sufficiently open to discover something we had not previously considered.

It was that realization that led me to begin wondering whether push hands was training something far more universal than balance or technique.

As I reflected on Waitzkin’s description of push hands to write this piece, I began recognizing the same principle in places I had never thought to connect. I saw it in my yoga lineage, particularly during the portion of class where practitioners were invited to leave the planned sequence behind and move intuitively according to what their bodies needed in that moment. I saw it in time spent outdoors, where no trail ever unfolds exactly as expected. I saw it in scientific inquiry, where the most meaningful discoveries often emerge only after an existing hypothesis begins to fail.

The common thread was not uncertainty itself. Uncertainty is unavoidable. The common thread was whether the nervous system could remain engaged with that uncertainty long enough to discover what came next.

Staying Open

When people speak about openness, my impression is that they often mean emotional openness or intellectual openness. They are referring to a willingness to listen, to consider another perspective, or to entertain a new idea. Those qualities are undoubtedly valuable, but they are not quite what I mean here.

I am interested in something that occurs before conscious deliberation.

From the perspective of the nervous system, openness describes a capacity to remain perceptually engaged with an environment that has become uncertain. It is the ability to continue gathering information even as previous predictions begin to fail.

That may sound deceptively simple, but it represents a remarkable neurological achievement.

Every moment, the brain is integrating information from vision, hearing, touch, proprioception, interoception, and the vestibular system while simultaneously comparing that incoming information against expectations built from previous experience. Most of the time, those expectations are accurate enough that they allow us to move efficiently through the world without consciously analyzing every sensation we encounter. Prediction reduces computational demand, making everyday life as efficient as possible.

Yet prediction is only adaptive when it remains flexible.

An environment that changes requires a nervous system capable of changing with it. The moment prediction becomes more important than perception, the relationship between organism and environment begins to deteriorate. We stop discovering what is actually present and begin defending what we expected to find.

Push hands creates this dilemma repeatedly.

A partner shifts their weight in an unexpected direction. Pressure changes. Balance begins to disappear beneath your feet. The nervous system is presented with a choice. It can immediately tighten, resist, and attempt to force the interaction back toward its original prediction, or it can continue sampling information from the unfolding exchange. Neither response is conscious in the moment. Both emerge from patterns that have been shaped through countless previous experiences.

The same process unfolds far beyond the practice hall.

A difficult conversation takes an unexpected turn. A patient responds differently than anticipated. New evidence challenges a long-held belief. A child reacts in a way that was impossible to predict. The circumstances differ, but the underlying question remains remarkably similar.

Can perception remain active while certainty begins to dissolve?

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in orientation as a neurophysiological process rather than simply a spatial one. Orientation is not merely knowing where we are. It is the ongoing process of updating our relationship with a changing world. Every meaningful act of orientation requires the nervous system to remain receptive to information that may contradict what it expected to encounter.

Perhaps this is why practices like push hands, intuitive movement, and time spent in dynamic natural environments can feel so unexpectedly alive. They require participation rather than execution. Instead of moving through a predetermined script, we remain in continuous dialogue with an environment that refuses to become entirely predictable. Attention broadens. Perception sharpens. Small adjustments replace rigid plans. The nervous system remains engaged in the present because the present continues offering genuinely new information.

This is a very different experience from simply reacting.

Reaction often occurs after the nervous system has already committed to a particular interpretation of events. Openness preserves the possibility that our interpretation is still incomplete. It allows perception to continue informing action rather than allowing expectation to dominate it.

I suspect that this capacity has become increasingly uncommon in modern environments.

Much of contemporary life rewards certainty. We rely upon routines, algorithms, calendars, navigation systems, and carefully structured schedules that minimize unpredictability. These tools are extraordinarily useful, but they also reduce the number of situations in which we are asked to continually orient ourselves to changing conditions. We become highly efficient at executing familiar patterns while spending comparatively little time practicing what happens when those patterns are no longer sufficient.

Seen from this perspective, staying open is not passive. It is an active physiological process that preserves our ability to remain in relationship with an unfolding world. It is the quiet decision, made thousands of times each day beneath conscious awareness, to continue perceiving before deciding.

When the Model Becomes More Important Than the World

Every nervous system depends upon prediction.

Without it, we would be forced to process every sensory experience as though it were entirely novel. Walking across uneven ground, driving a familiar route, recognizing a friend’s face, or reaching for a coffee mug would require an overwhelming amount of conscious effort. Prediction allows us to move through the world with remarkable efficiency because much of what we encounter is familiar enough to be anticipated before it fully unfolds.

Most of the time, this serves us extraordinarily well.

The challenge arises when efficiency quietly becomes rigidity.

Predictions are never reality. They are models of reality. They represent the nervous system’s best estimate of what is likely to happen next based upon previous experience. Healthy models remain provisional. They organize perception without replacing it, allowing new information to continually refine our understanding of the world.

Under conditions of persistent uncertainty or chronic threat, however, the balance between prediction and perception can begin to shift.

When the nervous system detects conditions that it interprets as increasingly dangerous, reducing uncertainty often becomes a higher priority than exploring it. Attention narrows toward information that appears immediately relevant to survival. Existing expectations become increasingly influential in shaping perception. Ambiguous situations are interpreted more quickly, often with less curiosity and greater confidence.

This is not a flaw in human cognition.

It is an adaptive strategy that evolved in environments where hesitation during genuine danger could prove costly. If the movement in the grass was a predator, responding a fraction of a second too early generally carried fewer consequences than responding too late.

The modern world presents a more complicated landscape.

Many of the uncertainties we encounter today are not immediately life-threatening. They are interpersonal, professional, intellectual, or emotional. They unfold over hours, weeks, or years rather than milliseconds. Yet the nervous system often relies upon the same fundamental strategies that evolved to manage immediate environmental uncertainty. As a result, we may become increasingly committed to our existing interpretations even when the situation would benefit from continued exploration.

In predictive neuroscience, moments when the world differs from our expectations are often described as prediction errors. Although the term sounds negative, these discrepancies are among the most valuable sources of information available to the nervous system. They signal that reality contains something our current model has not yet incorporated. Every meaningful revision of understanding begins with the recognition that our prediction was incomplete.

Practices like push hands place prediction error at the center of learning.

Every unexpected shift in pressure, every loss of balance, and every failed anticipation becomes an invitation to update rather than defend. The practitioner gradually discovers that being wrong is not the problem. The inability to remain perceptive after being wrong is what limits learning.

I suspect this principle extends far beyond movement.

Scientific progress depends upon observations that fail to fit existing theories. Clinical reasoning depends upon remaining curious when a patient does not respond as expected. Healthy relationships depend upon recognizing that another person’s internal experience may differ from the story we have constructed about them. Growth, in nearly every domain of life, requires us to encounter moments when reality exceeds our previous understanding.

The difficulty is that prediction error often feels uncomfortable before it becomes informative.

Few people enjoy discovering that they misunderstood a situation, interpreted another person’s intentions incorrectly, or built confidence upon incomplete information. The impulse to defend our existing model is deeply human. It offers the temporary comfort of certainty, even when certainty comes at the expense of accuracy.

From the perspective of the nervous system, however, remaining open to prediction error may represent one of the most sophisticated forms of orientation we possess.

Orientation has never required perfect prediction. It has required the ongoing capacity to detect when prediction and reality have diverged, and to reorganize accordingly.

Seen in this light, possibility begins to look very different.

It is not simply the presence of multiple paths that matters. It is whether our nervous system remains willing to perceive that more than one path still exists.

Remaining in Conversation with Reality

One of the greatest misconceptions about adaptation is that it requires us to abandon prediction altogether. It does not.

Prediction is indispensable. Every movement we make, every sentence we speak, and every decision we reach depends upon the nervous system’s ability to anticipate what is likely to happen next. Without prediction, coordinated behavior would become nearly impossible.

Adaptation depends upon something more subtle.

It depends upon whether our predictions remain willing to encounter reality.

An open nervous system does not stop generating expectations. It simply refuses to confuse those expectations with the world itself. Every prediction becomes a working hypothesis, continuously revised through perception, movement, and experience. Rather than treating uncertainty as a problem to eliminate as quickly as possible, it allows uncertainty to remain present long enough for new information to emerge.

This perspective changes the way I think about learning.

For much of my life, I imagined learning as the gradual accumulation of knowledge. Experience meant adding another fact, another skill, another technique to an ever-growing collection of understanding. There is certainly truth in that view, but I have come to believe that meaningful learning also requires something else. It requires the continual willingness to release models that no longer fit the world as we find it.

In that sense, learning is not only additive.

It is adaptive.

Every meaningful insight asks something of us. It asks whether we are willing to loosen our attachment to what we previously believed in order to establish a more accurate relationship with what is actually present. Sometimes those revisions are small. Sometimes they fundamentally reorganize the way we understand ourselves, other people, or the world around us.

The nervous system has been practicing this form of adaptation for millions of years.

Every time an organism encounters an environment that differs from expectation, orientation begins again. New sensory information arrives. Previous predictions are evaluated against current conditions. Movement changes accordingly. This process is neither dramatic nor philosophical. It is simply what living systems do when they remain engaged with the world instead of withdrawing from it.

Perhaps this is why certain practices leave us feeling unusually alive.

A free-flowing yoga practice, a walk through unfamiliar terrain, an honest conversation that changes our perspective, or a session of push hands all share a common characteristic. They refuse to let us operate exclusively from habit. They invite us into an environment where participation matters more than execution and where attention must remain connected to what is unfolding rather than what was expected.

These moments often feel deeply restorative, not because they eliminate uncertainty, but because they reconnect us with our own capacity to navigate it.

Modern life rarely asks this of us.

Our calendars organize our days before they begin. Navigation systems determine our routes. Algorithms anticipate our preferences. Increasingly, technology removes the need to orient ourselves to unfamiliar situations. These conveniences are remarkable achievements, and I would not argue that we should abandon them. Yet there is a quiet tradeoff when too much of life becomes predetermined. We lose opportunities to practice the ongoing dialogue between prediction and perception that has shaped nervous systems for hundreds of millions of years.

Orientation has never been about controlling the environment.

It has always been about remaining responsive to it.

When we stop expecting the world to conform to our predictions, we recover something that defensive physiology often obscures. We rediscover the capacity to participate in an unfolding reality rather than merely reacting to it. Our movements become more fluid. Our thinking becomes more flexible. Curiosity returns. Possibility, which had seemed to disappear, begins to reveal itself once again—not because the world has changed, but because our relationship with it has.

Perhaps this is what practices like push hands have been teaching all along.

Not how to avoid uncertainty.

Not how to dominate it.

But how to remain in relationship with it.

The Neurophysiology of Possibility

When we speak about possibility, we often imagine that we are describing the future. We picture opportunities that have not yet appeared, decisions that have not yet been made, or directions our lives might eventually take. Possibility seems to belong to what comes next.

I have come to wonder whether it begins somewhere much closer to the present.

Perhaps possibility emerges whenever the nervous system remains sufficiently engaged with its environment to recognize that its current understanding is still incomplete. In that sense, possibility is not simply a collection of future outcomes waiting to be discovered. It is a physiological capacity that allows an organism to continue perceiving before prematurely deciding what reality is.

This perspective has gradually changed the way I think about health.

For many years, conversations about regulation have understandably focused on helping people move out of chronic states of threat and into experiences of greater safety. That work is profoundly important, particularly in a world where so many individuals live with persistent stress, trauma, and disconnection. Yet I have begun to suspect that regulation is not only about reducing distress. It is also about preserving the conditions under which perception can remain active, curiosity can remain accessible, and orientation can continue despite uncertainty.

An oriented nervous system does not require complete certainty before it acts. It does not wait until every variable has been resolved or every outcome has been predicted. Instead, it remains capable of adjusting as new information becomes available. It trusts that orientation is not a single achievement but an ongoing process, one that unfolds continuously through movement, sensation, perception, and relationship with the world.

This may be one of the quiet lessons embedded within practices as different as push hands, intuitive movement, scientific inquiry, and time spent in dynamic natural environments. Each invites us to participate in circumstances that cannot be entirely scripted. Each asks us to encounter moments in which previous expectations become insufficient, while reminding us that uncertainty itself does not require withdrawal. It simply asks that we continue paying attention.

That strikes me as a remarkably hopeful view of human physiology.

Hope, in this sense, is not optimism. It is not confidence that events will unfold according to our preferences, nor is it the belief that uncertainty will somehow disappear. It arises from something more fundamental. It rests in the recognition that healthy nervous systems are not designed to eliminate uncertainty but to remain in relationship with it. Throughout evolutionary history, organisms survived not because they could perfectly predict the future, but because they could continually update their relationship with an environment that refused to remain still.

Perhaps this is why certain moments leave us feeling unusually alive.

They are often the moments in which we are no longer operating exclusively from habit or expectation. We are paying attention. We are responding rather than merely repeating. We are allowing the world to reveal something we did not already know. Whether those moments occur during a conversation, on a forest trail, in a yoga studio, while practicing push hands, or in the quiet realization that a long-held belief no longer fits the evidence before us, they share a common quality. They remind us that life is not something we simply think about. It is something we continually orient ourselves within.

If that is true, then possibility may have very little to do with imagination alone. It may arise from one of the oldest capacities our nervous system possesses: the ability to remain in relationship with a changing world long enough for new information to become visible. Long before possibility becomes an idea, it is first experienced as orientation. The nervous system continues gathering information, continues refining its understanding, and continues participating in an environment that is always becoming something slightly different than it was a moment before.

Viewed through that lens, possibility is not the opposite of certainty. It is the natural consequence of a nervous system that has not mistaken certainty for reality.

Feral Medicine Utah | Kira Staggs

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