There was a ferryman named Ki Marta who had crossed the Bengawan Solo for forty years, and in all that time the river had never once told him, plainly, what it intended to do. Some mornings it lay flat and obedient as a sheet of batik cloth left to dry. Other mornings, with no warning that his eyes could catch, it swelled brown and furious overnight, carrying whole trees down from the hills as if the forest itself had lost an argument.
One evening a young man named Diro came running to the landing, his mother gravely ill in the village across the water, needing medicine that could not wait until morning. The sky above the Bengawan Solo was the color of an unglazed pot — neither promising rain nor promising its absence. Ki Marta looked at that sky for a long moment. Diro, impatient, said what young men often say to old men who hesitate: “You have crossed this river a thousand times. Surely you know it now.”
Ki Marta laughed, not unkindly. “I do not know the river,” he said. “I know how to hold the pole when I do not know the river. That is a different kind of knowing, and it is the only kind the river has ever offered anyone.”
He pushed off. They crossed. The storm broke twenty minutes after they reached the far bank, and the medicine reached Diro’s mother by lamplight.
The Vertigo of Not Knowing
Every human life eventually arrives at Ki Marta’s landing — the moment when the outcome cannot be secured in advance, when the sky gives no clean signal, and a decision must be made anyway. Illness without a diagnosis, love without a promise of return, a harvest planted before anyone can say whether the rains will come or fail. Uncertainty is not a special catastrophe visited on the unlucky; it is the ordinary weather of being alive, and the philosophers who have thought most carefully about the human condition have almost all had to stop, sooner or later, at this same river crossing.
What varies, tradition to tradition, is not whether uncertainty is real — everyone agrees that it is — but what a person is meant to do with the parts of a situation that will not hold still.
The Stoic Oar: What Belongs to Us and What Does Not
Epictetus, once enslaved and later a teacher whose classroom outlived his chains, drew the boundary with surgical plainness. He separated the world into what lies within our power — judgment, intention, effort — and what does not: outcome, reputation, the weather, other people’s hearts.
τῶν ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἐφ’ ἡμῖν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν tōn ontōn ta men estin eph’ hēmin, ta de ouk eph’ hēmin “Of things, some are up to us, and some are not up to us.”
Marcus Aurelius, ruling an empire that could not guarantee him a single certain tomorrow, wrote to himself in the same key, treating the unknown future less as a threat to be predicted than as raw material to be met with whatever character had already been built. The Stoic does not claim to read the sky better than his neighbor. He simply refuses to let the unreadable sky decide how steadily his hand holds the pole.
The Buddhist Current: Uncertainty as the Nature of the River Itself
Where the Stoic manages uncertainty from the outside, the Buddhist tradition dissolves the question from within, by naming impermanence — anicca — not as an unfortunate feature of existence but as its very texture.
सब्बे सङ्खारा अनिच्चा sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā “All conditioned things are impermanent.” (Dhammapada 277)
If all things are already in motion, then uncertainty is not a wound inflicted on a otherwise-solid world; it is simply what solidity was never able to promise in the first place. The Sallatha Sutta distinguishes the first arrow — the pain of an actual event — from the second arrow, which is the mind’s own resistance to not knowing what comes next. Ki Marta, in his way, had stopped shooting the second arrow decades earlier. He no longer suffered from the river’s silence. He had simply stopped expecting it to speak.
The Taoist Water: Yielding to What Cannot Be Forced
Lao Tzu offers a companion image that Ki Marta would have recognized instantly, since his entire craft was built upon it.
上善若水，水善利萬物而不爭 shàng shàn ruò shuǐ, shuǐ shàn lì wàn wù ér bù zhēng “The highest good is like water, which benefits all things without contending.” (Tao Te Ching, Ch. 8)
Water does not demand to know the shape of the container before it is poured. It arrives, and it conforms, and in conforming it finds its way through gaps that a rigid thing could never pass. Wu wei — action without forcing — is not passivity; Ki Marta poled that ferry with real muscle, real judgment, real risk. But he did not fight the river to make it certain. He shaped his effort around its actual, unpredictable nature, which is a different discipline than mastery, and in some ways a harder one.
The Bhagavad Gita: Acting Without Owning the Result
On the field of Kurukshetra, Arjuna’s paralysis is not cowardice but something closer to what Diro felt at the landing — the demand to act while the consequences remain genuinely unknown. Krishna’s counsel is among the oldest recorded answers to this exact vertigo.
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana “You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions.” (Bhagavad Gita 2.47)
This is not resignation. Arjuna still has to draw the bow. Ki Marta still has to push the pole into the current. What the Gita removes is the unbearable second burden — the demand that a person control, in advance, what only time and circumstance can settle. The oar is his. The river is not.
The Sufi Trust: Rumi and the Unseen Hand
Jalaluddin Rumi, writing centuries later in Persian verse, does not ask the seeker to master uncertainty at all, but to trust the intelligence that moves beneath it — a trust closer to love than to strategy.
این جهان همچون درخت است ای کرام / ما بر او چون میوههای نیم خام īn jahān hamchūn dirakht ast ey kirām, mā bar ū chūn mīvahā-yi nīm khām “This world is like a tree, O noble ones, and we are its half-ripe fruits.”
Ripening is a process no fruit can supervise. Rumi’s invitation is to remain attached to the branch — to life, to conscience, to love — while the ripening itself proceeds on a timetable no one on the branch can read. It is a gentler cousin of tawakkul, reliance placed not in the outcome but in the trustworthiness of the process that produces outcomes.
The Confucian Ground: Steadiness Before the Unclassifiable
Confucius, when pressed on matters beyond confirmable knowledge — the nature of death, the will of Heaven — repeatedly redirected his students toward what could be practiced with integrity in the present hour.
知之為知之，不知為不知，是知也 zhī zhī wéi zhī zhī, bùzhī wéi bùzhī, shì zhī yě “To know what you know, and know what you do not know — that is knowledge.” (Analects 2.17)
This is a quieter kind of courage than Arjuna’s battlefield or Rumi’s ecstatic trust, but it is no less essential. Ki Marta’s wisdom was, in the end, a form of this same honesty: he did not pretend to know the river. Knowing the limit of his knowledge was itself the tool he crossed with.
Modern Voices at the Same Landing
Centuries later, and in idioms far from any of these, Viktor Frankl would observe that meaning survives even in circumstances where every outcome has been stripped of certainty, because meaning is constructed in how a person meets the hour, not guaranteed by what the hour contains. Albert Camus, staring at a universe that refuses to answer the questions put to it, proposed that the honest response is neither despair nor false comfort but a kind of lucid, ongoing engagement — pushing the boulder, poling the ferry, without needing the summit to explain itself first. Václav Havel, writing from a prison cell about hope, insisted that hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. Each of them, in their own century, is still standing at Ki Marta’s landing, looking at the same unreadable sky.
Javanese Grounding: The Pole in the Unclear Water
Ranggawarsita, writing in the Serat Kalatidha during an age he himself called zaman edan — a time gone mad, where the old certainties had visibly failed — did not counsel his readers to wait for madness to clarify itself. He offered instead a discipline for living wide awake inside confusion:
Amenangi jaman édan, éwuh aya ing pambudi, milu édan nora tahan, yén tan milu anglakoni, boya kaduman mélik, kaliren wekasanipun, ndilalah kersa Allah, begja-begjaning kang lali, luwih begja kang éling lan waspada.
“Living in an age of madness, the mind is troubled; to join the madness is unbearable, yet not joining leaves one without a share, and hunger follows in the end. Yet by God’s will, however fortunate the forgetful may seem, more fortunate still is the one who remains éling lan waspada — aware and vigilant.”
This is not certainty offered as consolation. Ranggawarsita never promises that vigilance will part the clouds. He offers something closer to Ki Marta’s oar: a way of standing inside an unreadable time without either fleeing it or being drowned by it. The Serat Wedhatama extends the same counsel toward the inner posture required — cultivating sepi ing pamrih, action free of grasping for a particular result, so that the mind is not additionally destabilized by its own hunger for a guaranteed outcome. And beneath both texts lies the older, quieter foundation: nrima ing pandum, the acceptance of what is actually given rather than what was hoped for, paired with sumeleh, the settledness that allows a person to place their effort down fully without needing to grip its result.
Memayu hayuning bawana — to beautify and sustain the world — does not require that the world first explain itself. Ki Marta pushed his ferry into water he could not read, holding his pole with hands that had learned, across forty years, that vigilance and trust are not opposites. They are the same posture, seen at different moments of the crossing.
Diro’s mother lived. The storm came exactly when it wished to, indifferent to whether it had been expected. And the river, the next morning, lay flat and obedient again, offering no explanation for the night before — because it had never, in forty years, owed Ki Marta one.
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